


Start Over

by herrealname



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Trailer, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Clint Barton Feels, Clint Barton Has Issues, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Clintasha Week, Darkness, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Endgame, Everyone Has Issues, Everyone Needs A Hug, Everything Hurts, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, F/M, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Hurt, Hurt Clint Barton, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, I Blame Tumblr, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, I Don't Even Know, I Will Go Down With This Ship, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I'm Bad At Summaries, I'm Going to Hell, I'm Sorry, Identity Issues, Mental Anguish, Mental Health Issues, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, OTP Feels, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Protective Natasha Romanov, Starting Over, The Author Regrets Everything, The Author Regrets Nothing, The Avengers Need a Hug, What Have I Done, What Was I Thinking?, Why Did I Write This?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2019-11-18 12:50:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18121070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herrealname/pseuds/herrealname
Summary: She remembered his offer, one he had made by pushing damp hair out of his face with one hand, and extending the other out to her, beckoning for her to take it. To let him help her. To let him take her to shelter, from the cold and from the rain. To let him bring her home. Now, she would do the same, and bring him home too.





	1. Bring Him Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"The world has changed, and none of us can go back. All we can do is our best, and sometimes, the best that we can do is to start over."_ \- _Peggy Carter_ in _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_

It all felt very familiar, well, at least to her. A little past twelve midnight, standing on a quiet street in the rain, a kaleidoscope of fluorescent colors from neon banners staining the slick tar surface. 

She could recall the ache in her feet, from all the running that she’d done. The heaviness in her chest, from whatever she’d been attempting to run from. The cautiousness in her manner, when she had felt his presence like a change in the air, a presence that made her hairs stand and her fingers ball up into white-knuckled fists. He hadn’t drawn his weapon when she had turned around to face him, but she remembered having a steady hand on hers. 

Clint had used to remark that she had been like a deer in the headlights, when they had first met. 

Jesus, she was beginning to forget the sound of his voice, how the words had sounded like on his lips, from his throat; it’d been two years since he’d vanished into thin air, after all. Two years since she had brokenly assumed that he was gone too. 

She remembered weeping quietly to herself over the fact that the last time they had spoken to each other before the fateful event, they hadn’t talked about anything important. In fact, all she had done was chide him over his rookie mistake of eating way too many barbecued chicken — a belly wasn’t going to mend the bitterness he carried within him over the house arrest. 

Of course, barbecued chicken was good for the kids because they loved it, but it was much less so for him. 

But she hadn’t said she missed him, missed seeing him, missed teaming up with him — all of which she did, especially after being on the run for two years. She hadn’t apologized for hitting him a little too hard in the airport in Leipzig. She hadn’t told him to kiss the god-kids for her, didn’t even say she missed them too.

But there Clint stood now, barely recognizable and yet the very spitting image of his past self, the sole to his boots drenched with rainwater and fresh blood pooling from his mark. Middle of the street at midnight, fingers gripped firmly around the handle to his blade, ready for a reckoning. 

Natasha would have spoken up. She should have. 

The archer had eased her then-rabid mind by dishing out a dad joke, before introducing himself on a first name basis. She remembered her limbs freezing into place, not that the night had been cold back then, but from absolute fear. A coldness in her blood that the man had very quickly helped to warm up. 

She remembered his offer, one he had made by pushing damp hair out of his face with one hand, and extending the other out to her, beckoning for her to take it. To let him help her. To let him guide her out of the dark, angry, anxiety and death-ridden corner that she had been backed into for far too long. To let him take her to shelter, from the cold and from the rain.

To let him bring her home. 

Natasha had had so much blood on her hands, so much red colored into her existence, and she recalled how he hadn’t cared one bit. How it didn’t matter, not to him. She had been so full of violent, erratic colors meant to scare and deceive, and Clint had been colorblind. And so she had let him. 

Standing there now, in the rain, the assassin could see their roles in reverse. A man with a reputation so dirty that even the Yakuza daren’t cross him, and instead warmly welcomed him into their ranks as an ally. The man with blood stained across the surface of his blood, drenched up his dark leather sleeves to his elbows. A man so angry, so violent, so dark, so... broken. 

They were the best of friends, and she nearly didn’t recognize him. 

Dread was beaten into his back, and he carried himself like weights had been strung around the back of his neck, resulting in a slight hunch. She wondered long and hard, if this was how Clint had found her, all those years ago? With her small frame struggling to carry the full weight of her sins? 

And then he must have felt the air change, or rather, the lack thereof. Natasha had stood calm and firm as he had sharpened his blade across his steel wrist guard, probably not something one would normally do. And so he felt it, the stillness in her manner to match the adrenaline in his, and so he stilled too. 

She watched as he straightened out the hunch broken into his back. She watched as he pulled the mask from over the top of his head. She watched his hair dampen in the rain, and that same faint brush of his hand across his forehead, to push the hair from his now-damp face. 

Then, he looked at her, wide-eyed and suspended in space and time — like he was a deer, and her presence was a pair of headlights in his path. 

The blonde mustered the courage to look into his eyes, and spent the long seconds — where they had their gazes locked — worrying about who was going to be staring right back. She wouldn’t know how to react, if there was nobody at home. And that was exactly what she was met with when their eyes met. 

Clint had once told her a knock-knock joke, back when she was just freshly inducted into SHIELD. It had started off as a joke, an almost funny one at that, and then it had ended off as an offhanded remark about how it always seemed like the lights were off with her. Emotionally unavailable, scarily present in person yet absent behind the eyes, like her body was a vessel and the vessel was vacant. 

He had called her out and said that he feared what it meant, and she had gotten overly defensive, and that was their very first major tiff. And he had been right. 

It was scary, indeed. And Natasha was a woman of many feats, her bravery being one of them these days, and her fearlessness being another, but there she stood, fingers trembling with small panic. She adjusted the grip of her fingers around the handle of her umbrella, and felt the spray of rainwater against her face. 

She had stared right into the abyss with a straight face so many times before, but none of that ever felt the way it did to stare into the void behind his eyes. Crescent shadows colored the bags beneath his eyes, a gauntness in the hollow of his cheekbones to match. He looked like he hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept for years. 

The blonde cracked her lips apart, attempting to speak once more. _How are you?_ Stupid question. _Are you okay?_ Obviously not. _What happened?_ The fact that she was here meant that deep down, she already knew. 

_Do you remember me?_

She was afraid to know the answer. Perhaps he was so far gone that he’d left all of their history behind. After all, he did leave her behindwhen the world imploded, and he didn’t have the mind to come back. So she pressed her lips back together, tightened it into a single taut line, and she watched him quietly. 

They weren’t that far apart, but not too close either, maybe eight feet. And so, with every step he took towards her, Natasha could see the gears churning out thought after thought, after thought of afterthoughts in his head. She could see the caution he put into each careful step, his boots crunching and splashing against moist gravel, his feet rolling from heel to ball to toe. 

It was as if he was trying to prolong each step, stretching out the time needed to put one foot in front of the other. It was like he was making time for himself, so as to pull himself together and get his head set straight in a game that she didn’t know they were playing. 

Was he scared of her, like she had been scared of him all those years ago? Was he going to attack her, like she had been planning to back then? What would he do, if he didn’t remember? 

What would she do, if he didn’t remember her?

Natasha wasn’t a stranger to dark places — bouts of grief and anger and despair that left her reeling in a pain so great, so intense, that she thought she would’ve snapped. She did snap. She had snapped. She could recall how odd but fitting it felt to stop feeling like a person, in a world she didn’t understand, and how easy it had been to dehumanize the person next to her too. 

Because how could anyone live so humanly and humanely in a world that took and took and took, and never explained why? 

She had struggled with that in the past, and found herself questioning the very same thought as of late. Clint had once told her that that was just how the world worked, and that it owed no one an explanation. If she had gotten his story straight, he must have questioned his own beliefs, lost a part of himself that helped him believe, and that must have led to how they both ended up here in the middle of an empty street in Japan, in the pouring rain at midnight. 

So what would she do, if she found out that he had snapped and fallen that far? She didn’t know. Her partner was always the one with all the answers, and she was always the one who only acted like she knew everything. 

She would stand there, maybe, as he looked past her like she was an object he barely remembered. She would grieve, surely, because losing him to the decimation would have been a thousand times less painful than losing him to himself. 

Perhaps she would cry, and have a drink, and then maybe she would have to finally learn to move on.

Natasha felt the prickling of hot tears at the back of her eyes, finding their way to the front. She could feel drops of water on her cheeks, but she couldn’t tell if they were the rain or her own tears. Probably the rain. 

And in those few moments, she didn’t realize just how far she had let her mind run. Her cryptic fears and her anxieties were getting the better of her recently, and her head was beginning to run out of ground to race on.

She pressed the pad of her tongue to the roof of her mouth, fighting away the rest of the tears that burned at the corners of her eyelids. She would’ve blinked them away, but there was something about staring into the void of his storm-colored eyes that spoke to her to not look away. Like deep down, she was waiting for a miracle to happen, and that if she blinked, then she would’ve miss it. 

By now, they were nearly toe to toe. 

Clint’s grip around his blade hadn’t relaxed, but his jaw had. His mouth went lax, his two front teeth scratching loosely against the flesh on the inside of his bottom lip, like he was about to say something. Maybe even test her name on his lips, to see if it still felt familiar to him. 

Her eyes drifted downwards to observe the bare movement of his lips, and when nothing came, her gaze traveled back to his eyes. 

She had missed it, the shift. What once had been a void was now materializing into something more comfortable to her, and visibly less comfortable for the poor man. 

Clint recognized her, she was sure of it. His hardened eyes had finally softened to the sight of her. The tension in his form had left from beneath his skin, and his muscles had defaulted into utter defeat. His breathing quickened, then slowed, then seemed like they wanted to stop altogether. 

And then, with a glint in his eye from the shame that colored his manner, and a quivering bottom lip, the man looked like he was about to cry. 

The former archer wasn’t one for tears, and her knowledge of that only made the sight of him hurt so much more; the last time he’d wept was on his wedding day, and the last time he had collapsed into an absolute blubbering mess was when he’d held his first child for the very first time. 

On pure, unbridled instinct, Natasha held an outstretched hand out to him, the way he had done for her that very first time, and then still so many times after. 

She watched as he stared at it, worried herself that he wouldn’t take it, reassured herself that he would, her eyes pleading for him to meet her halfway. She watched on as he looked away. She watched — in painful silence — as droplets of rain caught themselves on the eyelashes to his downcast eyes, and as the drops pelted onto and rolled off his cheeks. 

That man didn’t grab back. 

Until, he did. 

And the blonde breathed a sigh of relief as she tightened her grip around his. It warmed her, to know he was there. Maybe if she held on tight enough this time around, he wouldn’t disappear from the cracks between her fingers again. 

And then she pulled him in. And she guided him into the shelter of her umbrella and into the warmth of her arms. And the blood from his sleeves didn’t matter one bit as it rubbed off onto her skin. 

And finally, after two long years, six thousand miles, and a world of difference between them, he let her bring him home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, thank you Marvel for that unexpected drop of the Endgame trailer. This is for all of you Clintasha ship sailors since the first Avengers movie in 2012, that have stuck out this far and this long, especially after *shivers* Brutasha. 
> 
> Anyway, more chapters to come! Leave a comment if you liked this so far, or have suggestions to share. Cheers!


	2. One Conversation, One Hour of Your Time, That's All I'm Asking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tokyo, in the rain. Blood on his sleeve. Stains on her hand. His hand in hers, and hers in his, their presence finding each other. Two very, very lost people in the middle of a one-way street, trying to find something that they had both lost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"It's like no pain I've ever known,_  
>  _To love someone so much to have no control."_  
>  \- _Lost Without You_ by _Freya Ridings_

**_New York, 2004_**  
   
_One moment, she feels like she’s swimming in saltwater. Dark, cold, quiet, with not a care in the world. She enjoys this: the emptiness, the silence, just drifting into what she has come to name The Void. It’s a goal that she’s had, a state of mind that she’s been working towards for far too long._  
   
_Desensitized — yes, that’s what it feels like. She remembers days and nights where she has floated just above her own body, with no weight of the world or weight of a man bearing down on her. Those days and nights feel as weightless as this feeling right now, and she can quietly think to herself that she’s finally made it._  
   
_The next moment, her eyes burn. Her ears ring as monotonous noise come into earshot. She hears voices, or rather just one voice, so close to her but yet so far. There’s a soft echo that comes with each muffled word, and they don’t stop. They just... don’t stop. The voice details the day-old passing of former president Ronald Reagan._  
   
_Waking up is always hard, like her senses are dialled to eleven. Sometimes, eleven hundred. Natasha knows she doesn’t want to be here, shouldn’t be here, and all she wants to do is to slip back under into that safe, soundless, weightless space._  
   
_She can feel her bottom lip begin to quiver. Her mind races, a chorus of ‘no’s peaking with a crescendo. She really doesn’t want to be here. She doesn’t realize how the words in her head end up on her lips too, and her throat feels about as raw and rough as sandpaper._  
   
_Natasha presses her eyes shut, a muddy-feeling headache in the distance. Her lips keep moving, her throat keeps hurting, and she doesn’t hear her heartbeat quickening in staccatos in the background, off of the machine. She doesn’t want to be here, but she knows she is._  
   
_“Tasha?” The warmth of a familiar hand envelops her fingers. She doesn’t know if she’s the one that is shaking, or if it’s him, or if it’s them both. She pulls her hand from his grip as she blinks her eyes open._  
   
_The strange room comes into view as it blurs into her line of sight, though she’s not a stranger to rooms like these. She can feel hot tears burn at the back of her eyes, threatening to spill, and so she brings her hand to her cheek to try to stop them in their tracks._  
   
_Or at least, she tries to. Her wrist doesn’t get to travel too far, and soon enough she finds it tied down to a railing with a restraint. So is the other wrist. The ECG monitor beside her begins to pick up yet again, but both her hands fall back down beside her in defeat._  
   
_“Please,” the man beside her pleads to one of the medical personnel that pops her head into the ward to eye the monitor. “Can we just take them off, please? She has a... It’s a- It’s a thing with her. Please.”_  
   
_“She’s on a hold, Clint,” says the personnel. “I’m sorry, we can’t take them off.”_  
   
_Natasha can barely move her head. Her neck feels so extremely sore, like her throat is bruised. Still, she manages to set her eyes on the man beside her, her partner, and a fire begins to flare in her belly._  
   
_Clint sits in an uncomfortable-looking chair by the side of her bed, a hand over his mouth. There are crescent shadows beneath his eyes, and the look in his eyes is one of weariness, like he hasn’t slept in days. The tip of nose is red, and his cheeks are flushed. She knows this look._  
   
_She can recall, as clear as crystal, the look in the eyes of one of her old classmates, after said classmate had found the corpse of a girl lying in the bottom bunk with her wrists slit. It’s the very same look — a look of haunting, a look that wants so much to help but doesn’t know how._  
   
_As she stares at him, glares at him with each agonizing breath that she takes with a sore throat, tears begin to trail down the sides of her face. There’s a primal anger in her gut, and all she wants to do is gouge his eyes out when he looks at her with soft eyes._  
   
_She failed, because of him. She doesn’t want to be here, but she is. Because of him._  
   
_“How could you?” Natasha barely manages to choke out. Her words come out in half-empty rasps. Her throat is in shreds._  
   
_Her eyes sustain a watchful, waiting gaze as he grimaced at the way her voice sounds. They watch, as his glances fall to her throat. His eyes glance over the ligature marks that circle the circumference of her throat — bruises and lacerations, over and over and over._  
   
_“I...”_  
   
_“Why?” She presses. Emphasizes._  
   
_Clint blinks — one, two, three times, and then a couple more after that. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he says. He wipes a jacket sleeve over a running nose. “You’re sick.”_  
   
_The redhead’s glare at him is so intense that she can feel a vein pop in her own forehead. Her glare is so intense that she can almost see the inside of his head, racing a thousand miles per second. For someone who looks like he thinks too little, but often thinks too much, Natasha thinks that he should think less._  
   
_Less for himself, and less for someone else._  
   
_Her body and her mind have had so many owners, none of them her own, and she doesn’t need yet another person to do her thinking for her. Even if it makes sense._  
   
_Even if he’s right._  
   
_“I don’t... want you here,” she takes a warning tone with her partner. “I want you to go. I don’t want to look at you.”_  
   
_“Tasha, please.”_  
   
_The archer makes another attempt to hold her hand. She shies away immediately, like a knee-jerk reaction, like he’s the plague. Her wrist gets caught against the restraint, and he presses his lips together. He chews on the flesh of his bottom lip. He can’t even bring himself to look at her when tears start to roll down the sides of her face yet another time._  
   
_He keeps his hands to himself, his fingers weaved together as if he were in prayer. But he didn’t believe in God, and frankly, neither did she. He tucks his hands beneath his chin._  
   
_“Talk to me, Tasha. Please,” his voice is unsteady. She can even hear a slight crack in his pitch. “I just need you to talk to me. Tell me what’s going on with you.”_  
   
_Natasha blinks. “No.”_  
   
_“One conversation. An hour of your time. That’s all I’m asking,” Clint pleads. “And then I’ll go, and you never have to see me again, okay? I’ll go.”_  
   
_She can’t seem to stop the tears from coming, from falling. They stain the pillow that her head is on. The droplets get caught in the tangled mess of her crimson coloured hair. Her bottom jaw trembles and her teeth chatter. She presses her teeth together, clenching up her jaw._  
   
_She shifts her gaze away from him — she can’t even bear to look at him right now without feeling absolutely sick — and watches the ceiling instead. The tears don’t stop. Each breath still shakes, quaking with anger and despair and utter desperation._  
   
_The weight that she has been trying so hard to outrun — the weight of the world, the weight of a man, the weight of her nightmares — the weight descends on her yet again. She feels like she’s fighting a losing battle at the collapsing end of a hydraulic press. It’s like her ribs are stacked beneath two hundred pounds of iron plates, and she’s shattered underneath._  
   
_She can’t breathe. She can’t think. And everything just hurts and she wants to go back under. She doesn’t want to be here._  
   
_Natasha presses her eyes shut again, warm tears trickling. His thumb wipes the streak away with a slight hand. “I hate you,” she finally says. Her voice breaks, tapering off towards the end._  
   
_At least that’s one weight off her chest. With one weight off, she’s met with the beginning of sharp, inconsolable sobs. She struggles to stop them, because each gasp sends a jolt of electric pain down her throat, but she can’t._  
   
_The man has his fingers on her cheek, just barely. He has his fingers in her hair. He loves the colour of her hair; she remembers that he does._  
   
_At times like these, she forgets that she sees the world in him on a good day, where she’s reminded of how exhilarating a breath of fresh air really is. Or standing on the beach, feeling the tide tickle her feet for the very first time._  
   
_Most days, though, most days are bad, but he still tries his very best to help her remember._  
   
_“I know,” says Clint quietly, tenderly. The tips of his fingers stroke the side of her head gently. She wants to move, to flinch away from his touch as a reminder that she doesn’t want him there, but she’s just so drained and exhausted. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know.”_  
   
_In between dealing harsh words and blame, he doesn’t stop telling her that it’s okay for her to hate him for what he did. For causing her to fail. For cutting her down. For bringing her back. For keeping her here._  
   
_In between the sobs that wrack havoc to her sore chest and ribs, and the soft sniffs that he takes to breathe through a nose that doesn’t stop running, somehow her hand finds its way back into his grip. His thumb rubs circles into the top of her hand as he tries to work through the sixteen walls that she has built up between where he is, and where he wants to be, in his search for her truth._  
   
_Clint stands to leave when his hour is up. She doesn’t let go of his hand._  
 

* * *

 

The smell of blood in her nose brought her back to days on the field, to a time before this. Before she’d had to worry about best friends and accords, rules of engagement. Before aliens, and magic, and existential beings. Before... feelings.  
   
She didn’t like the smell of blood, no. Most days, it made her stomach turn and left her feeling sick. But there had always been a sort of clean, methodical feel to being detached from the world. To have only one focus — a mark, a target, a goal to achieve that wasn’t fulfilled until she was elbow deep in the blood of someone else.  
   
Rinse, and repeat. Life was simpler then, when there was only one goal and nothing else in the world to worry about. Rinse, and repeat; she’d lived by that, learned to love that comfort. It was a corner that she had been backed into, a corner that left her with a false, almost-real sense of security. It had been a lonely place to be in, but at least it felt safe.  
   
Natasha spent most of her adult life fighting from falling into old habits. These days, it was getting harder. It was obvious that Clint had fallen into hers, and it was hard to watch.  
   
Tokyo, in the rain. Blood on his sleeve. Stains on her hand. His hand in hers, and hers in his, their presence finding each other. Two very, very lost people in the middle of a one-way street, trying to find something that they had both lost.  
   
But, as she slowly realized, they weren’t looking for the same thing.  
   
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.  
   
“But I am,” she replied. She squeezed the grip she had around his hand. He pulled away, and so she stared at the empty space in her palm where his hand had been just two seconds ago. “I just want my best friend back.”  
   
“But you see it, don’t you?” He asked quietly.  
   
“See what?”  
   
“What you’re looking for, I’m not...” He blinked his gaze away. “I can’t be who you want me to be. I just... I can’t.”  
   
“Why?”  
   
His gaze returned to her with a look of steel, cold and hardened. He responded to her question with a question of his own. “What are you trying to get out of this, Natasha?” He questioned curtly. “You’re not blind. You’re smart. I’m sure you can see that I am not the same person that you expected to find when you decided to come here. I’m sure you’ve put it together.”  
   
“I...” She paused, frowned as the reasons in her head just didn’t seem to fit together like they should have. “I don’t know, Clint. I got a lead, and I followed it. I just needed... something. Anything.”  
   
Clint’s brows furrowed into a slight frown, his lips pressed together into a fine line. “That’s not an answer.”  
   
She shrugged her shoulders in defeat. “I needed to know, okay? If you were really gone, or if you’d just left. I guess I needed answers, and maybe that’s what I’m trying to get.”  
   
The cold, hard look in his eyes softened just as his nostrils flared by the slightest fraction. Clint never had a hair trigger, was never really a man that was quick to anger at all, throughout the years she had known him.  
   
Now it seemed to come in waves. In the past five minutes that she’d met him again, she had seen his anger come in waves. And then, shame. Despair followed closely behind, before he would then default to an empty void, just waiting for the next strike of a match to spark an anger within him yet again.  
   
Clint wasn’t wrong. She was looking for her best friend, the cup-half-full man that always seemed to have it all figured out. She had once looked to him to find glimpses of hope, and maybe that was what she was looking for.  
   
And that man, his old self, he just wasn’t there. In his place was a reflection of  _her_  old self, bothered and unsettled, just wasting away like the living dead. Perhaps he was embarrassed of what he had become; maybe that’s why he didn’t want her here, to witness how far he had fallen.  
   
To be fair, he wasn’t the only one that had taken the tumble.  
   
Quietly, the man shook his head. “You don’t want this, Tasha,” he warned. “The answers that you’re looking for, what if it’s better if you didn’t know?”  
   
“Clint...”  
   
“I really don’t want to hurt you, Tash, but I know that I will. Please don’t make me do this.”  
   
“One conversation. One hour of your time. That is all I’m asking. And then I’ll leave, and you never have to see me again,” bargained Natasha. “That is what you want, right?”  
   
Empty, weary eyes stared back at her, then at the floor, then at the street in the background behind her. He blinked, residual drops of rain rolling off the tips of his lashes as he did.  
   
She waited for an answer that never came. “We should go,” was all he could bring himself to say.  
 

* * *

  
   
Natasha once overheard her mother share an analogy that a person’s house was a reflection of their state of mind.  
   
She had been just shy of six years old at the time, but somehow the words had stuck. Since then, the Russian had spent the next twenty-over years purposefully ensuring that her sleeping quarters were always spick and span. Whether it was just a bed and drawer and a handcuff to her name, or an apartment that overlooked Washington Street, nobody would ever find a mess in the areas that she lived in.  
   
It was just purely out of habit, yet another odd defence mechanism that she had acquired as a child to keep other people out of her head. Clint never did get the memo, and she could recall the months that the man had spent trying to figure her out by the way she arranged her shoes against a wall, all to no avail.  
   
Clint had, after all, had an understanding that was literal to a fault.  
   
The blonde stood in his living room now, and all she could smell was a ripe decay. The room was painfully quiet, just as much as he was too, and they hadn’t spoken a word as he disappeared into the bathroom for a shower. They hadn’t exchanged anything further either, as he re-emerged from the shower in fresh clothes and bare feet, the shower having washed off the grime on his cheekbones, but not the shadows beneath his eyes.  
   
The sullenness in his features was an uncanny resemblance to the shadows that were overcast down the side of his living room wall. The colour of his walls was in greyscale, dull and unfeeling, much like his muted character now. The flat’s furnishings, or rather the lack thereof, resembled the emptiness behind his eyes that she spotted glimpses of every now and again. The lack of any personal touches made his house feel impersonal, and the lack of personality made the house feel heavy. Heavy like the dread that was beaten into his shoulders.  
   
She spotted a sleeve of designs down the length of his left arm, woven intricately into the surface of his skin. The rest of it disappeared past his shoulder, beyond where his shirtsleeves kept them covered.  
   
She’d had similar works done on a large portion of her back, dating back a long time ago from before she’d known a better life than that. By now, all that was left of the work was the slightest corner piece over her right shoulder.  
   
The blonde kept her observations to herself. She kept to herself, all in all. As her partner sank down into a chair that was all the way across the living room from where she stood, she kept mum. She didn’t know what to say.  
   
Or rather, she knew exactly what she’d wanted to say, and they weren’t nice words. And she knew that he didn’t deserve any of it at all, but she just couldn’t help it. And if she didn’t know what else to say, then it was just best to stay quiet. That was another life lesson that her mother had taught her as a child — that if one didn’t have anything nice to say, then it was best to say nothing at all.  
   
Again, Clint never did get the memo.  
   
“I really wish you hadn’t shown up, Natasha,” he started quietly, after the longest time. And it hurt.  
   
She realized there and then that she had nearly forgotten the sound of his voice, in the amount of time that they hadn’t spoken. What a way to have been reminded of the way his voice sounded. What a choice of words to reconcile the years that they had spent apart.  
   
She swallowed. She blinked. She didn’t know how to react. Maybe that was the point. After all, he did warn her.  
   
“You know, because it’s just easier to place blame on a person that isn’t there,” Clint continued. Shame coloured his voice in overtones as he spoke truthfully. She remembered, he was always honest too, also to a fault. “Earth’s first line of defence, the most important people in the world. I found it easy to think that you were the most important woman in the world, and that you’d failed. That you failed, and I was the one paying the price. I guess I found it easy to think that, because I’d grown comfortable with you.”  
   
“You needed someone to blame, but you didn’t know who to point the finger at,” Natasha offered, her words careful. “I understand.”  
   
“It shouldn’t have been you, but it was. It’s not fair, and I’m not proud of that,” he said. “I came here because I knew this was the last place you’d ever be. I figured that if I hid well enough, if you never found me, I would’ve been able to outrun the fact that there wasn’t anyone to blame for what happened, at least for as long as I could. And then you show up, and I’m out of time.”  
   
She hummed in acknowledgement. There wasn’t much else that she felt she could say in response to that.  
   
Her response came non-verbally, by way of her feet slowly pacing around the room, not being able to stand perfectly still. It came in the form of her fingertips gently brushing across the stark surface of the nearby kitchen counter, over the tops of the backrests of chairs around his dinner table. Her fingers brushed over her coat. It came in the form of anything and everything that she could busy herself with, to keep her mind off of an explosive reaction that Clint — by most means — didn’t deserve.  
   
The man was dishing out harsh truths as a favour to her, and she was taking the hits like a champ. Because he never lied to her, and she never took offense to that, and that was what being a good friend was, right?  
   
Clint sniffed sharply. She turned to face him, sparing a quick glance at the way he had his head hung over his shoulders, elbows over knees. She couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t tell if he was crying. “I just... I couldn’t live with the ambiguity of what happened,” he admitted. “I didn’t know how, how to keep going. And I needed something.”  
   
“I understand, Clint. It’s fine.”  
   
“It’s not.” The man’s eyes met hers. They were bloodshot, yet completely dry, as if he was torn between feeling everything and feeling nothing. She wasn’t a stranger to the look in his eyes. She used to see that in a mirror. “It’s not supposed to be fine. You’re not supposed to be okay with this. You’re not supposed to say that you understand.”  
   
She pressed her lips together as she closed the distance between them both. She sat herself down on the arm of a chair just adjacent to his. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”  
   
“You were an easy person to put the blame on, only because I knew you, Tasha. I knew that you would say that you understood, that you’re not mad. That it was okay, that we were okay,” he spoke, tension growing through clenched teeth. “But it’s not. It can’t be.”  
   
“Why not?”  
   
“Because I’m wrong!” He raised his voice. She flinched at the volume, straightening herself out.  
   
Natasha swallowed against the bile that was rising in her throat. She struggled with the thick, growing lump that was causing her throat to tighten up. She tucked both hands, both trembling hands, beneath her thighs.  
   
After a weak attempt at steadying her breaths, her voice, her tone, she spoke: “Are you looking for forgiveness? Is that it?”  
   
Because to ask for forgiveness would have been to admit that a mistake had been made in the first place. But Natasha didn’t think, not for a second, that it had been a mistake.  
   
Sure, she was mad at him. Every time she looked at him, the pit of her stomach would warm, but not from what he did. Not for the way he had admitted that he’d blamed her for the death of his family. Not for his decision to leave her behind.  
   
No, she was mad at how his absence had made her feel utterly handicapped. She was mad at how comfortable she had become with her partner, to a point where she had taken his presence for granted. She was mad at how the series of unfortunate events had broken her completely, and how she’d had to haphazardly put herself back together, all on her own, just to do the best she could to move on.  
   
Once upon a time, he would have been there by her side, every step of the way. With him on her arm, his fingers in her grasp, his encouraging grip within her reach — that was how she had willed herself to move on from everything else that left her in pieces.  
   
He was always there, watching, making sure the pieces fit back together in the places that they were meant to be. It was tough, to do it alone.  
   
But if running was what Clint had to do, like how putting herself back together was what  _she_  had to do, then there was no blame to be passed. She believed that he did the best he could, with the state of mind that he’d had, and Natasha understood that.  
   
She used to be that.  
   
“No, I’m looking for a reaction,” he threw back, a certain terseness to his tone. She frowned at him, not angry, just confused. Clint cupped his face in his hands, sighing into his palms with absolute dread and tire. “Tasha, I... I’m sorry. It’s- it’s fine.”  
   
Natasha pondered for a few good seconds, trying to make due sense of his words, of what he was expecting of her. Then, she shifted from her place on the arm of the chair, to the spot on the couch, right beside him. The length of both their thighs touched. She could feel the man leaning into her, putting a fraction of his weight against her, coming into her space so minutely yet so tellingly — the most minute of gestures meant the most to her.  
   
“You know, after it happened, the first thing I did was go to your place,” she started quietly, calmly. She took his fingers in hers, playing with them absentmindedly. His gaze flickered attentively between her face on their hands. “The whole sequence of events, it didn’t register in my head until I walked into that empty house. And I sat there, for hours, like I was waiting... for someone, or for something to happen. I don’t know.”  
   
“I cried on your living room floor,” the blonde admitted. His eyes went back on her, observing her features, and she glanced right back. His fingers stiffened in her hands, his face beginning to swell, little by little. She shared a small, slight smile. “I thought you were dead, and it hurt. So badly, for so long.”  
   
Clint swallowed thickly. “I’m sorry.”  
   
She shook her head, dismissing his apology. “Did you know we tried again? 2 months after, with whoever was left, we tried again. We tracked him down, we travelled galaxies, and again, we very barely got out alive,” Natasha recounted. She still felt faintly bitter about the whole encounter. “We didn’t give it much thought at all, before doing it. We had half a plan, a ship, two intergalactic pilots, and a whole lot of anger. I guess we were looking to retaliate, looking for a quick fix, and you’re right. We failed, a second time around.”  
   
“You went to space?” He frowned.  
   
“Y-yeah... a living planet, honestly just looks like the hills in the Philippines.” The blonde picked at the drying skin around his cuticles, then her own. “We have a lot to catch up on.”  
   
“Yeah.”  
   
She shifted in her seat, turning to face him, guiding her own gaze to fall completely on the man that sat before her. “You left me,” she finally said. Not bitter, not enraged, just the slightest bit shattered.  
   
Clint looked away, a thing he did often now. He nodded quietly. “You let me think you were dead. Gone, like the rest of them,” she continued. “I  _am_ mad, Clint. But I’m tired of being angry at the world. I’m just... thankful that you’re still here.”  
   
Her words led right into silence, a silence she didn’t feel inclined to fill. It was no doubt that between them both, her partner had always been the one that usually preferred to fill in unnerving gaps with some offhanded, literal comment or joke. The man was uncharacteristically, yet also very understandably quiet.  
   
And if she dared to admit it, her ears ached to hear his voice, only because she hadn’t heard a word from him in far too long. Her chest swelled, just waiting for another joke, another stupid comment to fill the silence between them both, like he always did. Like same old Clint.  
   
Of course, Natasha was comfortable with silence, their silence in particular. She had known the man long enough, had — over the years — become so comfortable with the way they existed about each other that they didn’t need words to fill the gaps. Words were a luxury, a trait that she very much appreciated from a man that used to spend days, months and years trying to get her to belly-laugh her way out of deep funks.  
   
But they were never once necessary. His presence was always enough. Just enough.  
   
Not long after, Natasha felt a drop of water on the skin of her hand, slip-sliding right into the crevice between both their palms. And then, another one. She chewed on her bottom lip as she spared a glance at him. As she watched, Clint ran his free hand over his face, smudging stray tears across his swollen cheeks. His hand rested over his nose and lips, but he couldn’t hide the obvious quiver of his bottom jaw.  
   
She sighed quietly to herself, feeling her throat grow swollen and thick, and her stomach drop. She felt her nostrils begin to flare as a contrasting response to the burn at the back of her eyes, both familiar sensations. She held her breath, an attempt at pushing this edging feeling back down into her gut, and to the back of her head.  
   
It hurt, so intensely, to see her beloved partner in this state. She could describe the pain as similar to being torn limb from limb, or being skinned alive, but even that wouldn’t be nearly enough to put into words how painful it was to witness the man falling apart.  
   
She could feel his pain, all of his anger. If Clint was anything like her, anything at all, then she understood his anger — at the world, at everyone, at himself. Natasha knew exactly how it felt to harbour bitter, toxic, unrelenting anger for so long, only to end up knowing and feeling nothing else. And even for someone as distant as she’d once been, it had been agonizing, and it had drained her of so much life that she’d forgotten how to live.  
   
She could recall his arms around her, always around her, as she threatened to come apart. He would hold her, hold her together, and he would whisper reason and wisdom into her ear until she could keep herself together.  
   
Now it was as if the roles had been reversed.  
   
The blonde collected both hands from her lap and wrapped them around his faintly trembling frame. Almost immediately, he leaned into her. His head found the perfect spot to nestle into the nook of her neck, and she rested her chin atop his head. The texture of his hair scratched at her cheek.  
   
She had an arm around the backs of his shoulders, and the other cradling the side of his head. Her fingers wove easily into his hair, the tangle of his damp and drying locks feeling both foreign yet familiar in the gaps of her fingers.  
   
“You can’t keep feeling this way, Clint. You don’t have to,” she whispered in a soft, small tone. Her fingernails combed at his hair. “Come home with me.”  
   
Natasha could feel the shake of his head beneath her chin, the heaving sigh that rocked his chest. “Tasha...” He began, voice cracked and strained, and she could feel her own stomach lurch.  
   
“You don’t have to do this alone. Please, just... come home,” she pleaded. Her voice was beginning to falter, much like her resolve. She often saw herself as hardened these days, but it was just something about Clint that screamed emotion, that screamed feeling.  
   
The former archer tried to speak. But in between tears and stifled sobs in her shoulder, he minced his words. Each phrase ended before it began. The best that he could do, it seemed, was to continue shaking his head, right where she could feel it. Right where she could feel it hurt.  
   
She breathed slow. “Please don’t make me choose between the world and you, because you know I’ll always pick you,” she insisted, pleaded, all a last-ditch effort to bring him home. “But you know that I can’t. Please don’t make me choose.”  
   
“I’m sorry,” Clint cried softly into her shoulder. “I-I can’t, I’m not...” His words tapered away towards the end as his voice fractured into three tones. His frame shook, and hard. Maybe, just maybe, she was shaking too. “Tasha, I just can’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry...”  
   
The man started, and he didn’t stop.  
   
He apologized, over and over, and over again. His many apologies brought the assassin way back to when he would sit by her bedside, in one ward after another, one incident after another, with her blood beneath his fingernails and his hands shaking to no end. He would spend his visiting hours apologizing for the many ways he’d thought he’d failed her.  
   
And it hurt, to remember.  
   
And somewhere between the first and ninth apology, Natasha could sense a shift in his words. She wasn’t sure that he was still just apologizing for not wanting to come home. It was more than that, and she could hear it in the tone of his voice just how much he felt he had to apologize for. It just wasn’t that simple, wasn’t just one thing. Nothing these days, nothing after a world-ending event, was ever that simple anymore.  
   
Natasha gazed up at the ceiling, half embracing the sour burn at the back of eyes, half trying to blink the searing sensation away. Her teeth chattered against the flesh of her quivering bottom lip. “It’s okay,” she did her best to say.  
   
She whispered it into his hairline, supplemented it with the slight caress off her thumb against the skin of his forehead. She knew, deep down in her heart, that her own words weren’t convincing enough to her own two ears. But maybe they were enough for him, to settle him.  
   
“It’s okay. I understand. It’s okay,” she smiled, willing it not to water away.  
   
It took the better part of five minutes for either of them to properly settle down — Clint, as he stopped heaving and choking on his own breaths, and Natasha herself, as her chest stopped swelling sorely like her heartstrings were an exposed nerve.  
   
She breathed, and he breathed, and eventually he made the decision to pull away from her. She observed the thin slivers of tear stains down the lengths of both his gaunt cheeks, and the swell beneath his bags. His face was flushed, splotchy and red along the stretch of both his cheekbones, and at the tip of his nose. His eyes, undeniably red, were trained on his unmoving fingers.   
   
The number of times Natasha had seen her best friend cry was close to none. His tears were always out of joy, over happy things, and if they were ever sad, he would only offer the slightest weep. The faintest twinkle of a tear would rest upon his waterline, and he would blink it away, and maybe a faint crack in a low voice, and that would’ve been it.  
   
So, this was a sight to behold, an hour of her time that she would keep so close to her heart.  
   
She cherished, in silence, the vulnerable moments that she shared with him now. She quietly wondered to herself if this was the last that she would be able to see of him, and if it was, then she wondered if this was how she would’ve preferred to have spent their last moments together.  
   
Clint then looked at her, his watery gaze building more and more courage as it trailed its way up her frame. From fingers to knees, knees to elbows, elbows to shoulders, and shoulders to her lips, the sharp incline of her nose, and then her own two eyes. “When do you leave?”  
   
“Tomorrow.”   
   
His watchful gaze faltered, tumbled back down to her fingers. “And what happens next?” He asked.  
   
“We regroup. Put a plan together. Try again,” said the blonde. “We’re not giving up, Clint. I’m not, not until you get them back.”  
   
“At what cost?”  
   
His eyes were stricken with a quiet, muted fear, and he was deep in thought. “Whatever it takes,” she offered.   
   
He inhaled both deeply and sharply, and began to chew on his lip again. His fingers were rigid against his own knee. Natasha easily took his hand in hers again, wove her fingers through his, and smiled slightly as she felt him relax against her touch. “Can I come back?”  
   
“Promise me that you will?” His eyes searched her face, peering frantically through her features for the answer he wanted to hear. His grip seemed to tighten around her palm.  
   
She sighed. “I’ll try.”  
   
The blonde gave him a quick squeeze and began to stand, and her former partner seemed almost reluctant to let go. She felt like she needed to leave, and leave that very second, because if she’d stayed any longer, she wasn’t quite sure she would be able to walk away from that flat alone, to leave and head home without Clint. Without what, or who, she came here for.  
   
But she loved him, and she respected his decision. She loved him enough, as everything — a best friend, a partner, a past lover, an integral part of her existence, the only reason she had managed to live this long, fulfilling, good life.   
   
She loved him just plenty enough to let him go.  
   
Natasha pressed her lips to his hairline, where he sat. “Love you,” she murmured, barely sounding a peep. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”  
   
“Okay,” he stood up with her.   
   
He trailed along behind her as she mustered up enough courage to put one foot in front of the other. He followed her across the room, right on her heel, his nerves very obviously getting the better of him.  
   
If it had been any other small, stupid solo mission that didn’t have the world hanging in the balance, Natasha was sure — from the familiar look in his eye — that he would’ve asked her to stay. If it had been any other tough, complex, damaging mission, he wouldn’t have let her go, like he hadn’t a number of times before.  
   
But Clint grabbed her coat from off the backrests on one of the dining chairs, and he held it out to her, letting the coat go slowly. He couldn’t bring himself to walk her to his door. As she took the coat from his grasp, and brushed past him and towards the door right after, she squeezed his arm reassuringly.  
   
The blonde had one foot out the door by the time he called her name again. “Tasha.” She turned around, her heart was in her throat. He was still where he stood, by the table in the kitchen. “I never got to ask — how bad is it?”  
   
“I’m not letting you do that to yourself.” Her lips were pressed into a thin, fine line. She grinned back at him, albeit a little sadly.  
   
“Did Barnes make it?”  
   
Natasha felt her whole body still at the mention of his name. She hadn’t heard it addressed to her in the longest time, for the better part of two long years. But of course, Clint was the only one who knew, the only one who would’ve asked a question like that. And she felt raw and exposed, just as vulnerable as she currently felt as she worked through the process of leaving her best friend.  
   
It wasn’t an answer, not even in the slightest capacity, but it was all she could manage. “Bye, Clint,” was all she said. And she shut the door behind her.  
 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, sorry this took a minute. I rewrote this sequence at least 3 different ways, and just couldn't get it quite right. Anyway, hope you liked it. As you can see, I love me some hurty. But don't worry, it gets better, I promise! 
> 
> More chapters to come, hopefully quicker. Comments and suggestions are most welcome. Cheers!


	3. I Got You, Okay?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Perhaps that was the telling difference between them — between a man and a woman, between a parent and an adult, between a soldier and a spy, between the fractured and the broken, between having lost everything and having never really had anything to lose at all in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _“It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.”_  
>  — _The Leftovers_ by _Tom Perrotta_

_**Vienna, 2002**  
  
With a quick tug at the hem of her evening gown, she dashes across the road just before traffic comes down the lane. Her fingers pick at the skin on her left wrist as she walks. Her stiletto heel gets trapped in between the cobblestones on the pavement more than once, and it’s slowing her down. As she turns the corner into a narrow back street, she kicks off her heels and holds them by the tips of two fingers.  
_  
_Unsurprisingly, she can already hear the sirens of emergency services in the distance, a little loud and out of place for twelve midnight. Their fight hadn’t exactly been the most silent, and certainly not in the most secluded of places._  
   
_She had left his drained body in his hotel room no more than fifteen minutes ago, his throat sliced from ear to ear by means of the man’s own garrote wire. He had knocked her around plenty, given his size, and had gotten in a few good kicks. In between breaking two tea tables and tossing her into a hardwood armchair, she’s pretty certain — by the way that she can’t take in a full breath — that the fight had cost her a few broken ribs._  
   
_Probably some bleeding, like a leaking faucet somewhere inside of her too. She’s not a stranger to pointed-toe dress shoes pressing into her abdomen. She’s best friends with a lacerated liver, and a ruptured spleen. She’s building a good rapport with bleeding kidneys too. She feels the slightest bit lightheaded, which doesn’t point to anything good._  
   
_But she’ll take care of that later. First, she needs to get off the damn street._  
   
_She wraps her left arm around her torso to support her right side of her rib cage, and winces when a sharp jolt of pain spreads through her shoulder. She can feel the two separated pieces of her collarbone grate against each other when she moves. She can sense the growing swell of a nasty bruise right over her left temple, where she’d been shoved head first into a vanity mirror._  
   
_Natalia paces down the empty back street, getting unapologetically drenched by the heavy drizzle. Her hair is tangled and soaked, a couple of strands getting into her eyes. She’d sweep them from her face, if only her hands hadn’t been stained with that much blood. Her bare feet are cut and sore from the rough gravel of the ground. Her body hurts to move, her many injuries only aggravated by the need to keep on moving._  
   
_Her adrenaline, and her need to get as far away from this place as possible, are the only things keeping her going at all._  
   
_As she expertly evades the public eye through dimly lit back roads, cheap electronic banners blinking away against the rainwater, her mind begins to race. The panic finally hits her like a bullet train at full speed, and she’s almost winded._  
   
_What had she done? What if this was a mistake? She had spent half of her lifetime learning to live under the authority and rule of larger, older, crude and manipulative men. And now she had just watched the blood from her handler’s jugular bleed into a stark white duvet. She’d dreamed of a day like this for far too long, but now that she had actually done it..._  
   
_The assassin stumbles as a piece of sharp, loose gravel gets lodged into her sole, tearing through her skin. She can feel the sting against cold rainwater on the street. The stumble rattles her chest, and knocks the wind right out of her as both sides of her ribs are enveloped with agonizing pain. Seeing white, she pauses to keel over against the metal grill of a shuttered store front._  
   
_Her senses are dialled up two notches, paranoia striking her at every turn. She knows deep down that she needs to keep running; the people that own her, they’ll come for her as soon as they realize that her handler had missed his check-in mark. She is aware of the stakes — a joint task force between KGB’s best and a full team of highly skilled HYDRA operatives, put together with only one goal in mind: to recapture her and put her back into the program._  
   
_A program, a group of people that she’d much rather die than return to._  
   
_Even with her eyes pressed shut to counter the enlarging black spots in her vision, she can feel a change in the air. The humid air becomes weighty, heavy in her already constricted lungs. Her stomach sinks so low, it’s almost to the floor. There’s a presence, someone unfamiliar, someone she hasn’t met before, because she can always recognize an operative that she knows by their footsteps, but she doesn’t recognize these._  
   
_Surely they couldn’t have commissioned an operative this quickly, to bring her in._  
   
_The unknown figure’s footsteps inch closer towards her in the narrow street, a pair of black combat issues crunching down on the cobblestone. Given how close the figure is to her now, a distance of less than fifteen feet between them both, Natalia knows that it’s useless to even think of starting to run._  
   
_“Quite a mess you made back there, huh,” says the figure._  
   
_The figure’s voice is the voice of a man, likely American. A vague, watered down midland twang in his tone leads her to assume that the American man comes from the Midwest. His voice is low, but not gruff. Careful, but not cold. In fact, funnily enough, the man’s voice is about as smooth as butter to a heated knife._  
   
_She stills as she snaps her head in the direction of the voice. The dark figure is tall, at least half a head taller than her. His build is relatively broad, his shoulders built like the typical American soldier. He’s carrying something on his back, but she can’t quite make out what it is. She can see darkened shadows of his two handguns, resting calmly in both thigh holsters. He has a hunting knife down the inside of his right boot._  
   
_A left-hander._  
   
_Within seconds, she’s making checking off a mental shopping list of the weakest points on his body. Left-handedness leaves his left open, and his right weak. If she can get his left shoulder separated, he’ll pose that much less of a threat. By the way he’s standing, putting the weight of his stance on his right and favouring his left, she can only assume that he has an old injury in his right knee or hip — easy targets._  
   
_Natalia has her hand on her own handgun, more than prepared to draw it. It hasn’t hit her quite yet, but her blood runs cold at the anticipation. The tire is just starting to settle in her bones, leaving her feeling heavy and a little less battle-ready._  
   
_The man takes a step forward, closing up the distance between them. She takes a step back, maintaining it. On instinct, she draws her firearm, her aim of the barrel expertly centred at the sweet spot between his eyes._  
   
_Unfazed by her gesture, he paces forward just enough to come into the light, and she can start to see the structure of his face. His face is gruff, good-looking in the most typically American way. He’s clean shaven over sullen cheeks and a rigid jawline. He looks almost forgettable, but there’s a knot in her stomach that warns her that he’ll be anything but._  
   
_She observes, learns every dimension and detail to his face, and burns it into the back of her mind. Her fingers adjust themselves around the grip of her gun as she does._  
   
_“You know, I’m sure you’ve been told that red is a good look on you, but blood isn’t exactly a color,” the man says, nodding at her hands and grinning. She catches onto a small quirk on the right-side corner of his lips. “I’m Clint, by the way.”_  
   
_Natalia is wary of responding. She stays quiet, her firearm still drawn and aimed in his direction._  
   
_“If you could just get that gun out of my face, we could have a proper conversation,” Clint offers. He steps closer, and this time she doesn’t move. Her eyes are busy scanning him over and over, her mind preoccupied with the case he carries over his right shoulder like a rucksack._  
   
_She can bet both her kidneys and a left foot that there’s a tactical rifle hidden_   _beneath the hard-shell case that's strapped over his shoulder._  
   
_The young assassin blinks. “Are you here to kill me?” She questions calmly._  
   
_“Supposedly so,” he responds. “But I don’t intend to. Certainly don’t want to. Gonna get shit for it, but I was just hoping to talk.”_  
   
_“Why don’t you want to? You Americans hate Russian spies.”_  
   
_“My government doesn’t define me. My morals and my values do, plus my gut. Kinda why I left the military,” Clint explains. “Hate to break it to you, Natalia, but my gut isn’t a bigot. It just generally hates assholes.”_  
   
_“You’re not military?”_  
   
_“No, not anymore. I’m with SHIELD.”_  
   
_SHIELD. The name sounds familiar. The familiarity of it tickles at her brain, like she’s heard about it before. Maybe even studied it in passing. She can only recall old stories of Red Room alumni Dottie Underwood’s run-ins with a lady that went by the name of Peggy Carter._  
   
_The SSR, a former war agency, absorbed into a counter-terrorism and intelligence organization, extra-governmental. Deadly, lethal, a company of mercenaries dressed in dress suits — very much like how the man who calls himself Clint is dressed right now._  
   
_She can hear the classes, all the propaganda and gimmicks, right in her ear._  
   
_“And SHIELD is not military?”_  
   
_“Not really, no. I mean, we do answer to people in high places, but I like to describe the organization as a grey area.”_  
   
_“Grey?”_  
   
_He hums. “Politically grey. Strategically grey. Morally grey. Functionally grey. Whole lotta grey-”_  
   
_“Are you a mercenary?” She asks._  
   
_“By trade, yeah. But I’m what SHIELD likes to call a specialist. I can pull the trigger, if it comes to that, but I rarely ever do. It’s usually recon and intelligence, maybe a bit of counter-terrorism. Target packages don’t come by often, unless it’s a pressing issue.”_  
   
_“And mine landed on your desk.”_  
   
_The man’s lips widen into a grin again. “I don’t have a desk,” he quips. If it’s meant to be a joke, she doesn’t laugh. “My government wants you dead. I don’t. There’s your grey area. Simple.”_  
   
_“Why?”_  
   
_“What do you mean, why?”_  
   
_“Why don’t you want to just do your job? Why don’t you just kill me? Why did you change your mind? I don’t understand.”_  
   
_He sighs, taking yet another step closer. He squints up at the sky, glancing up at the drizzle. “Well, to them, you’re just a name on a piece of paper. To me, I just watched you kill your handler. And I don’t think you did it just because you like the thrill of watching a man’s life leave his eyes.”_  
   
_Stupid, she scolds herself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Every other second more that she spends conversing with this strange man, is another second of letting him do a profile on her, which he has already started on. She should be leaving, should be running. She can incapacitate and lose him long before he’s able to draw his weapon. She can just kill him right there and then, and blame it on his own sentiment and weakness. She doesn’t know why she keeps letting her mouth run._  
   
_There’s just something about him..._  
   
_Natalia shifts uncomfortably, repositioning her stance while feeling absolutely unsettled in her clothes. She’s fully clad, but his observations of her make her feel absolutely naked._  
   
_The young assassin watches as the man’s eyes flicker from where he’d held her gaze just moments earlier, to somewhere lower. Her neck and collarbones, and then down the length of her dress where a torn slit began. She hates being looked at, detests the attention more than she detests herself. For some unbeknownst reason, the man’s eyes soften by the time they make their way back up to meet her eyes again._  
   
_Yet again, she shifts uncomfortably, subconsciously recoiling further into herself, as if she’s attempting to take up the least surface area as physiologically possible._  
   
_When he speaks again, the humour in his tone is long gone, and is replaced with an edge. “Do you need help, Natalia?”_  
   
_“No.”_  
   
_“Are these people hurting you? The people you’re working for.”_  
   
_“No.”_  
   
_“The marks on your neck,” he nods in her direction. She knows exactly what he’s referring to, though, she’d chosen a high-necked gown that evening for the very purpose of hiding those prints. “They don’t look like they’re just a day old. Can I ask how that happened?”_  
   
_Natalia tightens her grip around her gun, positioning her finger right on the trigger. She’s so close to pulling it. All she needs to do is apply a little bit of pressure-_  
   
_He raises both his arms in surrender, leaving himself open. Both his hands are the furthest distance possible from either of his firearms, as if he’s trying to make it a fair point. “You’re not a huge talker, fine. If you don’t want to talk to me, then just hear me out, alright?”_  
   
_She raises a brow, wary._  
   
_“Let me help you,” he says. She scoffs harshly. “You’re running, so it’s obvious you don’t want to go back there. But if you come with me, you don’t have to run. I’ll protect you.”_  
   
_The first thought that comes to Natalia’s mind is that the man is full of bullshit. First and foremost, she can take care of herself. She doesn’t need the protection of another man. She’s been around too many men, too many owners, too many stupid and empty promises, all enough to know better._  
   
_“Look. If you’re not going to kill me, then I’m leaving,” the young assassin declares firmly._  
   
_She’s already weighing the odds, flip-flopping between whether or not to kill the man, or just start running and trust that he won’t start shooting at her when she does. Either decision is a hard one to make — one is against her nearly non-existent but barely-there moral compass, and the other is against her better judgment._  
   
_Natalia is just one pivot away from getting the hell out of there, when the man starts spitting words again._  
   
_“How long do you plan on running, huh? How do you plan to do this alone? For god’s sake, you’re barely an adult,” Clint drills her, this time taking a more severe tone._  
   
_To be fair, she’s on the brink of turning nineteen. She’s spent a good part of the past ten years learning how to survive. She’s been dropped in a tundra and left to learn to survive in the most unfavourable conditions. She’s outlived every other girl in her program, both in her class and in the classes above and below her._  
   
_She’s survived hell, and she has done it all on her own. Running, and running alone — for however long she can until she can’t — really doesn’t seem all that daunting._  
   
_But he doesn’t know that. Doesn’t have to. It’s none of his damn business, but the man sure as hell is doing his best to make it part of his._  
   
_“How long, how far do you think you can run before they find you? And what’ll happen once they do? You’re a million-dollar investment, surely they won’t kill you.”_  
   
_No, they definitely won’t. Knowing HYDRA and the KGB both, both entities contributing a large part to her training and programming, they’ll make her beg for her own death long before they’ll deal it. They’ll put words into her head again, layer by layer, until she screams her throat raw. Until she loses her voice. Until she’s so far removed that she doesn’t even know how to scream anymore._  
   
_They’ll strip her of all free will, all autonomy to her body, and even to her mind. She knows this. She knows what to expect, only because they’ve done it before._  
   
_Thing is, she’s prepared. She knows what she has to do so that they don’t take her alive, and that’s enough for Natalia._  
   
_“They won’t find me,” she insists._  
   
_“I’m certain that they will. They always do.”_  
   
_“I’ll do what I have to, to make sure that they don’t. I know what I have to do.”_  
   
_Clint stares at her, and again, she hates being looked at. It makes her extremely uncomfortable. She wants to move, to get the hell out of there, but she finds herself frozen still by his watching glare. She’s not usually like this._  
   
_Then, he looks away, looks to the floor. Not the best tactical choice when a gun is pointed in one’s face, but he does it anyway. She’s still frozen still, and she soon begins to realize that it’s not the work of his gaze._  
   
_He sighs heavily to himself before he looks back up at her again. “I can help you, Natalia. I’m offering you a way out that doesn’t end with a gun in your mouth. Let me help you.”_  
   
_His declaration leaves her feeling attacked. It leaves her feeling hot and bothered, and dirty and heavy, and all she wants to do now is bite back at the man with another rude quip, but she finds that she can’t. Every time she opens her mouth, the words just don’t come out. She can only imagine that she looks like a gulping goldfish._  
   
_For once in her life, which hasn’t been that long at all, Natalia is at a loss for words. And she doesn’t like this feeling, the feeling of not being on top of things she should’ve been on top of._  
   
_It’s like being backed into a tight corner, and she hates tight corners as much as she hates tiny rooms, and handcuffs, and beds with rungs for headboards, and big offices at the end of long halls, and smelly old men._  
   
_“I genuinely don’t want you to get hurt, Natalia. Believe me, that is the last thing that I want,” he says, and it’s almost convincing. “I just want to help. I just want to share with you the place I call my home, because you look like you need it.”_  
   
_Home. It’s a word that hasn’t graced her with its presence for the longest of times, hasn’t even crossed her mind. An odd idea that she has learned to be unfamiliar with. The last time she ever had a home, a proper home — with two bathrooms and a kitchen, a grand staircase and the conditional love and warmth of two parents — she had been just shy of turning nine._  
   
_The word doesn’t sit right on her tongue, feels weird on her lips, and she doesn’t like the taste of it when she says it. Home._  
   
_Home is overrated, but he seems to believe in it._  
   
_Clint shifts, wipes a damp hand across his face to get the rainwater out of his face. She stills at his sudden movement, reassuming a rigid stance with her firearm aimed right at him. The young assassin scolds herself internally for having been caught that off-guard._  
   
_He steps closer, one footstep at a time, and her grip grows tighter. He stops just a few inches from the firing end of her barrel, unfazed and unafraid. He’s close enough to even press it right into his skin, to rile her on to pull the trigger. Natalia has had handlers that have guilt-tripped her exactly like that, and has been punished more than once for being weak for not daring to do the damn deed._  
   
_She just keeps waiting for the shoe to drop, for this Clint character to show his true colours and prove that he’s not that much different from the people that own her. It just doesn’t come._  
   
_“Let’s make a deal, okay?” He offers. He’s close enough to observe that her hands begin to tremble. Whether from tire or from fear, neither of them knows, but he doesn’t bring it up. “If you want to leave, Natalia, I’ll let you leave. You can run. I won’t follow.”_  
   
_Natalia blinks at him, at his offer. The man’s hair is falling in his face, getting more and more drenched with rainwater as the drizzle begins to escalate._  
   
_He weaves his fingers through head of hair, first beginning with his fringe. He pushes the hair out of his face, to reveal the slightest of smiles. “Or you can put the gun down, and I promise you, I will walk you out of here, out of this country, out of this continent, and you will never have to go back. You never have to see any of them ever again. I promise I won’t let them get to you.”_  
   
_A lot of the time, her mind is always ahead of her body. She’s been like that, even as a child. Maybe it’s her intellect, but Natalia always tries to make sure that her mind works faster than her reflexes. That’s survivor instinct. That’s intelligence. That’s the fine line between being an expendable child soldier, and being the asset that her handlers can’t kill._  
   
_But the action comes before she even thinks about it, her better, more rational judgment becoming all but a useless afterthought. Her hands begin to lower, along with the gun in her grip, and her aim grows lax. The move results in a white-hot sear throughout her chest. She bites down on her bottom set of teeth._  
   
_Her mouth is dry, as dry as her throat, and her lips are chapped. “I don’t trust you,” she says. It had been meant to leave her lips with conviction, but it comes off as small and timid. A tiny voice._  
   
_Clint nods. “I know. You don’t have to,” he says. “Honestly, keep the gun on you if it makes you feel any better. You can shoot me any time you think I’m messing with you.”_  
   
_The young redhead stares at him. She isn’t staring him down, not exactly, but there isn’t a word quite fitting enough to describe exactly what this is. It’s... working through her inner thoughts, with her eyes using him as a visual focal point. A visual cue, at times._  
   
_She stares at him with a frown etched across her forehead. She frowns way too much for an eighteen-year-old girl. Some mornings, she looks into the mirror and sees slivers of wrinkles, and she frowns at those too._  
   
_“What do you say?” The man is a lot of work. As in, he is really a lot of work. She notices that his hands are always busy, always directing and maybe misdirecting, always doing something and never doing nothing._  
   
_He says this while raking his fingers through his damp hair, yet again pushing the hair from his face to reveal the most charismatic, confident, reassuring grin. He says this with a hand outstretched, beckoning for her to return the gesture._  
   
_Against all of her better judgment, against her rational mind, Natalia holsters her gun. It’s not smooth, or glorious, or a sequence of events playing out of a script. No, not at all._  
   
_When she holsters her firearm, her feet do an awkward tangle as they step and retreat, step and retreat, not knowing whether to move towards the man or away from him. He doesn’t laugh at her obvious struggle, doesn’t butt into her complex decision-making process._  
   
_If anything, his eyes only flicker down to her hands, and there’s a fraction of a frown woven into his brows once he does. Then, he looks up again, and he reignites another smile, his features soft and welcoming, warm and inviting. And memorable. So very memorable._  
   
_The fingernails on her right-hand tug at the skin on her left wrist. It’s a habit that she still has yet to find the time to kick. They scratch, and pick, and scratch and pick until she can come to a decision. And finally, with a deep inhale that ends up abbreviated by a sharp pain in her side, she takes his hand._  
   
_He beams, squeezes the grip that he has around his hand as he does. There’s something about his smile, something about him that’s different. And then, he pulls her into a warm embrace, firm yet gentle. She’s not comfortable with embraces — they leave her not knowing what to feel, and she doesn’t like not knowing._  
   
_But it’s the first time in a long time that she has felt arms around her that aren’t trying to kill her. It’s been forever since she’d laid a cheek on the shoulder of another person. Maybe she’s a little touch-starved, and maybe he’s a hugger. She’s in between stiffening up at his touch, and collapsing right into his embrace as she feels her body beginning to give itself away._  
   
_Then he squeezes her shoulder, and pulls away. He peers intently into her eyes, with purpose. “I got you, Natalia. Okay?”_  
   
_She breathes. She remarks: “I hate that name.”  
  
_

* * *

  
 She sat, observing. It was a thing that she did, and she did it often enough. Her introspective mind often pointed her in the direction of people-watching, only because she enjoyed knowing how the world ticked on by. If the world itself wasn’t something that made sense anymore, at least she could find some comfort in its people.  
   
Natasha had been questioning that, as of late.  
   
She sat, a sweaty palm mindlessly wringing up the skin on her left wrist, and watched the scene before her as it unfolded. She was at the airport, and had observed that at least half the boarding gates were closed and decommissioned. This was widespread, a scene not unfamiliar across the floors of the largest of airports, both public and private. There just weren’t enough people left in the world that took flights anymore, let alone the people that could afford it, or the pilots to run it.  
   
She watched as Japanese businessmen made their way to their gates, briefcases in hand. They sported weathered suits, and black dress shoes with a lacklustre shine, block heels clacking on half-polished linoleum surfaces.  
   
She watched a mother on edge as she sat alone. The dark-skinned woman that sat across from her had one arm wrapped tight around the midriff of her two-year-old son that sat on her lap. The young boy fussed about uncomfortably in her firm hold, the heels of his shoes bouncing against her knees. The lady had a cold, distant, almost frantic look in her eye as her gaze darted from left to right. She looked as if she was waiting for a lost child to return. When her grip grew firmer around the boy, he shrieked, and she reluctantly let go.  
   
Natasha watched an Asian lawyer study her case files atop a desk, as she sipped her coffee. Another man knocked over his tea over all of his papers, and not exactly by accident — it looked like the test papers of students he couldn’t be bothered to grade.  
   
A man with a thick Irish accent sat two rows ahead of her, a seat away from being back-to-back with the lady and her young son. As he spoke on his phone, to someone Natasha assumed to be his girlfriend’s mother, his thumb traced the weathered edges of a photograph that had been tucked away in a book, fashioning a bookmark. It was a candid photo of a fiery haired woman not much older than him, with his arms around her as they laughed heartily into nature.  
   
He tucked the photo back in between the pages of his book, and closed the cover.  _Where They Went_ , the book was titled.  
   
Over the past two years since the decimation, Natasha had seen the book making its rounds amongst whoever that was left on this earth, all just trying to make sense of what had happened. She’d seen the title page at least five times in the past hour, one paperback each in the hands of five different passengers. Another one of those books sat in the lap of a man seated just three seats to the left of her, at that very moment.  
   
She had seen it on trains and busses, cafes and airport lounges. Waiting room halls in public hospitals. Libraries half as packed as they should’ve been on the evening of a school day.  
   
The world had seemed to want to know where the disappeared had gone. There were television interviews and podcasts that constantly brought up eyewitness recounts of what had happened, all even to this day, two whole years later. The interviews would launch into hour-long roundtable discussions about religion — the rapture, and a second coming being focal points — and the possible existence of multiple dimensions.  
   
Had the disappeared risen into the arms of Christ, only to leave the rest of the Earth subject to a seven-year tribulation? Were the ones that remained just not worthy of the first phase of the rapture?  
   
Or was the act of disappearance a work of undiscovered science, still well beyond anyone’s imagination? Had the disappeared been displaced into another mirror dimension? Did that mean that more than one dimension existed, and if so, would that mean that multi-dimensional travel would be possible in the near future?  
   
Or had the disappeared just blinked out of existence, like they hadn’t existed in the first place?  
   
Nobody really knew what had occurred, of course, except the ones that were there to witness the purple titan snap half the universe away. It was a painful secret that the team had to keep mum to themselves, even though the world rightfully deserved answers.  
   
Natasha had been curious and had read the book herself — courtesy of a long intercontinental flight — and had come to realize that the book wasn’t so much an explanation of where they went, than it was a discussion from where everyone else that remained would go from there.  
   
Times like these, over books like that, she took to wondering if the human condition was more so a battle towards resilience than the actual practice of understanding the incomprehensible. And if so, then despite the world-ending event, everyone that remained was doing pretty well for themselves. It wasn’t so much a condition anymore, and instead was just a steepened learning curve.  
   
She was still trying to get ahead of that, that steep learning curve, but the feat was proving itself to be harder than she had initially thought.  
   
The blonde checked the time on her phone, then tried to blink away the dryness in both her eyes. She hadn’t slept, not since before the flight over. Neither since she’d seen Clint, alive and well, and oh so very reluctant to follow her home. Natasha found that she couldn’t sleep, not with her failure in enticing him home constantly at the back of her mind, and so she had given up on that.  
   
The sight of him haunted her. Having had seen him at all, haunted her. She’d learned as a child that only the dead haunted the living, and that lesson had changed over time, the older she grew. Well, Clint wasn’t exactly dead, and she wasn’t exactly living either. She rested her head in her hands, heavy from pure tire and exhaustion, and she sighed.  
   
Even when she closed her eyes, or rather, especially when she closed her eyes, all she could see was Clint. Her best friend, with his sides shaven, with the bags beneath his eyes and a newfound darkness to him that she couldn’t begin to comprehend. Her former partner, in a mask that he pulled overhead, in taut black leather armour, the stained blade of a masterless warrior in his hand. Masterless, purposeless, homeless.  
   
The way he stood, all the ways he had let himself go, the lack of the usual glint in his eye. A strange unfamiliarity, a space that she should’ve known like steps in an instruction manual, like words in the constitution, a space that she now didn’t know how best to navigate. Which side was up, and which way was down?  
   
When bearings were hard to get, she couldn’t deny it was still relatively manageable to fly a straight route, for a trained pilot. But it was also twice as easy to try to pull up, thinking that the horizon was the horizon, only to end up pushing into a nosedive and realizing it far too late. With him, she’d lost her bearings.  
   
Clint looked different, of course. Haunted, to be exact. And the way he carried himself in the night was as if he’d wanted total strangers to look him in the eye — whether in passing, or in the face of an imminent death — and understand exactly how horrible he felt, every second of every day of the current predicament in which he lived his life now.  
   
Perhaps that was the telling difference between them — between a man and a woman, between a parent and an adult, between a soldier and a spy, between the fractured and the broken, between having lost everything and having never really had anything to lose at all in the first place.  
   
Clint wore his heart on his shirtsleeves, and the world reacted. Natasha never did like the attention, never did like feelings and the turmoil that came with it. Even at her most vulnerable, there was always a role to be played, and for better or for worse, she always played the part. Maybe that was why she often seemed stronger than she felt, and perhaps that was the only thing that kept her going the past two years.  
   
As much good as being hardened had been, it was doing her head in. She was half as sharp as she used to be, and twice as brittle, and was running herself three times faster into an existential crisis.  
   
Sitting there, in a waiting lounge and waiting for her flight to board, Natasha couldn’t remember the last time she ever really felt happy. Felt genuine, heart-warming joy.  
   
Sure, there was the time back in 2005 that she and Clint had skipped out on a  _very important meeting_  to watch each other wolf down six glazed donuts in under two minutes. He’d won, and she’d nearly ended up in the hospital from choking on her fourth donut.  
   
_Death by donut_ , Clint had joked.  _Not the worst way to go._  
   
There had been 2009, when they had gone under the radar for a  _very important, extremely time-sensitive_  4-day mission to Budapest, all just to fuck with Phil. She could recall the look on their handler’s face — the disapproving scowl hanging low and heavy beneath a large forehead and a receding hairline. By the end of ten chiding minutes, they had managed to turn Coulson’s frown upside down.  
   
Back in 2000, she used to rest her head on James’ chest as they laid on his bed in a shoebox-sized room, and she used to skim through a collection of his classic novels. He’d collected it across many years, and since they’d both spoken at least thirty languages, the collection never lacked variety. It had been her favourite pastime.  
   
It had been the little details that had struck a chord in her heart, like the dog-eared pages and a highlighted phrase every now and then. She would look at him whenever she came across an excerpt of highlighted text, and he would smile back. The smiles never reached his eyes, but they were close enough.  
   
Nearly two decades later, in 2017, and after at least three opportunistic visits, she stayed with James on a farm for two weeks. It wasn’t hard; she had a fairly strong command of Xhosa and found it easy to interact with his local neighbours in Wakanda.  
   
The soldier had been about seven months and a week into a twelve-month period of convalescence. He’d already begun to grow back into a handful of characteristics of his old self, a self that she’d only seen glimpses of in the past. A self, she assumed, was the man that Steve had missed in his best friend. Charismatic, though with a touch of quietness. Goody, though with a ton of sense. She never doubted that he was warm, though. That, she’d known from day one.  
   
It had been the little things, like the spark in his eyes when he would talk about all the unusual bits and pieces that he remembered from the forties, like the old-time tunes that he would hum when he was out working on the field. It was the way that he would get so animated and disgruntled over Billy, the unruly baby goat that ruined his life.  
   
She once found them both sleeping in his bed, with Billy tucked on the inside of his shirt, and the young goat’s tiny head sticking out of the hem of James’ shirt and resting lazily against his chin.  
   
Sure, the soldier had his bad days, and the really good days were still few and far between, but that encounter had been the most serene that Natasha had ever seen him, in all her years of knowing the man. The heart-warming sight had left a swell growing in her chest, and a heartened smile to match.  
   
That very morning, Natasha noted, had been the last time she had felt raw, unbridled joy. That was the last day, a day three years ago, that she appreciated everything going right, right before everything began to go absolutely, irreparably wrong.  
   
The blonde wasn’t a stranger to in-between places, and as her thoughts continued to grow on top of each other like a pillar as the days and months went by, she began to recognize it.  
   
The slight tingle in her extremities, the blank stares, the sinking feeling in her chest that made it hard to breathe sometimes. The heaviness in her body that made it hard to move. Her body often felt like it was wading in a body of water, sinking but weightless. An unnatural calm where she remained unemotional and unaffected.  
   
The emptiness in her stomach that didn’t ache. The dryness that burned her eyes raw, because she would go days being unable to sleep. An in-between place, a state of limbo, a feeling that had derailed her life into a heaping mess more than once.  
   
She hated this feeling, this place and state.  
   
Natasha chewed on the flesh of her bottom lip with a vengeance. No, she wasn’t going to be an enabler, to just let her mind roam through all twenty different ways that she could get herself out of this limbo. She was better than this, or at least she was fighting to be. There were better things to do, more important work to be done, more critical conversations to be had, all needing her to be clearheaded and thinking as sharply as a whip.  
   
She didn’t need to be happy. She just needed to be sane, and reliable, and on top of her game.  
   
She tucked both palms under her thighs, swaying herself back and forth over the bony groove of her fingers. And when that wasn’t enough to keep her mind distracted from the sinking feeling in her chest, when it didn’t help to loosen the breaths that were caught in her throat, Natasha rested her face in her open hands and sighed into her palms.  
   
She’d been doing that a lot recently, whether it had been trying to keep the band together to keep the world from falling further apart, trying to keep herself from falling out of said band, or when she had spent her waking hours mapping and chasing a masked killer down every bloody massacre. She rested little, sighed often, sat at a desk she didn’t use to have and rarely ever managed to stomach any food that she made for herself.  
   
“Didn’t sleep?” A voice asked, as a weight descended into the empty seat beside her.  
   
Natasha turned in the direction of the presence and shook her head. “Honestly? It’s been hard,” she smiled.  
   
“Why?”  
   
“Got a lot of things to think about.”  
   
“What kind of things?”  
   
She shrugged. “Life things,” she offered. “Nothing that you’ll have to worry about. At least, not yet.”  
   
He peered at her, and got in two sure blinks before dropping his gaze in tandem with a heavy sigh. “I can’t lose you too, Tasha.”  
   
The blonde licked her lips, contemplating her response. She eyed the man, who was overwhelmingly under-packed for a move across continents. “So are you here to tell me to stay?”  
   
“Thought did cross my mind,” he said. “But then the idea of putting my blade in the socket of the guy that killed my family just felt like the better option, if I’m being honest,” he then continued, to which she returned with a grin.  
   
Clint looked at her once more, catching her eye. “Tell me that if we win, we’ll do that together,” his tone was steady, strong, but almost pleading. “And if we lose, if we... die-”  
   
“If we lose, then we’ll do that together too,” Natasha finished. She chewed on her bottom lip. “I just hope it doesn’t have to come to that.”  
   
The man nodded quietly, sparing a slight scoff to himself. “Hope,” he said. He broke their shared gaze and shifted his line of sight to his lap to watch his own slackened hands. And also, to watch hers. “I’ve come to realize it’s a shitty thing.”  
   
She looked away, back out at the filtered streams of people pacing through the decently-sized waiting lounge of the private airport. “It’s a good thing to have.”   
   
It was, indeed, a good thing to have. In her darkest hours, he had told her just that, and it was a nugget of wisdom that she had kept dear to her heart long after. After all, she’d hoped to find him in Tokyo, and she did. She had hoped for him to head home with her, and despite the momentary setback, Clint was here now, wasn’t he?  
   
Hope, fleeting but rewarding.  
   
“Easy thing to lose.”  
   
“That, it is,” agreed Natasha.  
   
Her former partner sniffed and licked his lips. “I know I can’t take back what I did. I can’t go back to being who you used to look up to. With everything that I’ve done, with all this darkness and all this blood, I... I don’t know how to be that person anymore.”  
   
“It’s okay.”  
   
“I’m sorry that this is the person you get back.”   
   
“I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner,” she returned. Clint offered the faintest smile back — a glimpse, she felt, of an old friend. Perhaps he wasn’t all gone. Perhaps he’d been mistaken.  
   
They both shared a beat, a second of silence surely ticking into two, then three. Both tired, both weary, both sleepless, both apologetic. Both a little bit lost, but also a little more found, now that they were together.  
   
Natasha let her mind roam, this time frowning at the continuous sinking feeling in her stomach and chest. Even by Clint’s side, the feeling still remained, as if to eat and chew her up, then spit her out right in front of him. She felt almost sick. In their silence, a sour taste enveloped her mouth. And then, a quiet anger, and overbearing despair.  
   
The man quietly smoothed her prying fingers from her left wrist, and smoothed his own fingers into the palm of her left hand instead. “You okay?”  
   
She leaned into him, resting her weight against his sturdy arm. He never faltered. She propped her head against the corner of his shoulder, shaking it ever-so-slightly.  
   
“No,” the blonde admitted truthfully. She shut her eyes and breathed in deep, and then she sighed. “Not today.”  
   
“Yeah?” His voice was a low, grim, soothing hum. He kneaded his thumb into the skin of her hand, and she could feel a part of herself finally settle down to rest. His tired head lolled lazily to the side, and his cheek pressed up against the crown of her head. “I got you, okay?”  
   
“Okay.”  
   
“Let’s go home.” And she nodded quietly in response.    
 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Watched Endgame twice in the span of opening weekend, and I am a wreck. For those who've watched it, what were your favorite & least favorite parts - let me know in the comments or inbox me, would love to talk! For those who haven't, no spoilers here!
> 
> More chapters to come, hopefully quicker. Comments and suggestions are most welcome. Emotional venting is also welcome. Fix-it fic suggestions are more than welcome, as I'm looking for some great fix-its to read, so send 'em over. Cheers!


	4. I Don't Think You'll Ever Be Ready

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was nothing more warm and homely than coming home to a barren apartment, wasn’t there?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _“I went looking for knives, but they're giving me blooms,_  
>  _“I went looking for knives, and I was looking for you._  
>  — _Looking For Knives_ by _DYAN_

Her mind was restless these days. Often enough, she would have dreams that replicated old memories — some good, mostly bad. She thought that her vivid nightmares had ended a long time ago, after months and years of medication and therapy. Sadly, that didn’t seem to be the case.  
   
Her arm itched, and her mouth was dry, and she woke up to the feeling of ants crawling beneath her skin. The sensation gnawed away at her as she slowly came to. She blinked away the sleep from her eyes, and settled for staring up at the ceiling. Natasha didn’t realize that both her hands had been tensed into fists, that her sheets were balled up in tight grasps; she made the conscious effort to relax her fingers.  
   
That night, she had visited an old memory of her and James. It had begun as a quiet conversation between two acquaintances, a relatively pleasant memory of a simple exchange — the only kind he could manage. A simple exchange between two incredibly close people who’d grown so far apart.  
   
And then, the same sequence had ended with screams and shrieks, guttural voices splitting into two overtones, a result of pain. She couldn’t tell if it had been her, or if it had been James. Though, knowing wouldn’t have made that much of a difference. Her, or James, it would’ve all been the same.  
   
She knew, just as much as he did, the type of terrors that came with the machine.  
   
The nightmare left her brain feeling the slightest bit electric, and her heart racing. The sun wasn’t out just yet, and the night still had a long way to go till it was, but her body was itchy to expel the remnants of the nightmare from her system.  
   
A first remedy came to mind, to which she gave herself a mental kick in the butt. It was a difficult feat and a constant conscious battle, she had to admit, to work her way back to the good, healthy place that she had prided herself for maintaining across the better part of the last decade. And there she was now, aching to fall back into old habits and harmful coping mechanisms, and having to navigate her way back out alone.  
   
Sobriety had been that much easier when a pain-in-the-ass Clint had been there to smack every stray urge from her drug-addled, withdrawn brain. Sobriety had been that much easier when the world hadn’t ended, when the closest thing to a foreign enemy was one that came from another country, not another solar system. Sobriety had been that much easier when she was only haunted by hospital fires, and not burning cities.  
   
All she wanted was the familiar warm, fuzzy feeling in her bones, the one that could comfort her back into a more restful sleep.  
   
All she needed was half of an early breakfast.  
   
Natasha pushed the thought to a side, just as she had been doing to every other similar thought that came to mind, and barely made her way out of her bed. She got herself together by the bathroom sink, piece by piece, braid by braid, and then she threw some fresh clothes on and a jacket.  
   
Then, she made her way to the kitchen.  
   
Thankfully, no-one on the compound other than her was ever awake at four in the morning. More specifically, she was thankful that there wasn’t anyone about the compound at all, for now, so she didn’t have to answer questions about why she was up early, if she’d just woken up or if she hadn’t slept. She’d once been caught creeping around the pantry by Rhodes at five in the morning, caught in the act of putting together a peanut butter sandwich.  
   
He had asked her why she’d been awake at that hour, looking like the face of death itself, and putting together another one of her depression sandwiches. She had responded along the lines of detailing all the things that a depression sandwich could fix — an empty stomach, Monday blues, world hunger, climate change — and the one thing it couldn’t.  
   
She went about her breakfast routine without interruption. The blonde set the pan out on the stove, cooked herself a plate of eggs, stared at the fresh batch for a good five minutes, and then she threw her breakfast in the trash.  
 

* * *

   
**_New York, June 2004_**  
   
_It’s not a secret that her days have begun to blend together, all into one big blur. She’d been institutionalized back in May, and it’s a few days shy of July now. He constantly reminds her about exactly how long it’s been since she had been admitted. She constantly forgets._  
   
_When the days all look the same, it’s easy to lose track of how much time has passed. And more so, especially with all the fogginess in her head. The three months blur together just as easily as they had for ten years._  
   
_The only consolation, the one thing that’s keeping her grounded in the here and now, is the warmth of his hand tucked between both of hers. It’s the grip that he has around her palm, strong and sturdy and just... there. It’s the pressure of his fingertips upon her skin, heavy-handed enough to draw her attention._  
   
_It’s the stroke of his thumb that’s a quarter of the speed of her racing, anxiety-ridden heart. Sitting there, beside him, she inhales and exhales to the slow speed of his minute movements. With each conscious breath, the violent and erratic thump wracking havoc about her ribcage starts to slow. Her ears stop ringing, the black spots stop poking into her vision, and her chest begins to rest._  
   
_It’s the way that he can speak about anything under the sun with her. The way that his topics don’t revolve around her sickness, her weakness, her inadequacies. They spend the bulk of his visit talking about Coulson’s most recent fit over the slightest scratch on Lola’s paint job._  
   
_They discuss the trips they can go on together in the future, which he openly refers to as an ‘if’, rather than the dreadful ‘when’. He hasn’t been to the Black Sea at the foot of Ukraine, and she hasn’t seen the Plitvice in Croatia. Maybe they’ll visit Budapest one day, hike the Citadel at night to watch the city light up below them, and have the view at its peak burned into their memories._  
   
_So many plans for the future, yet so uncertain. The more they talk, the guiltier she gets._  
  
_“I don’t understand, she says._  
  
_He takes a deep inhale. “Understand what?”_  
   
_“Don’t you see it?” Natasha finally musters just enough courage to question. She gathers just enough bravery to dare to look him in the eye at all, when she does._  
   
_Their bundle of hands and fingers lay on a cosy resting place on her lap. She picks at his fingers half-heartedly, awaiting his reply. Despite the dull, ominous tone to her words, Clint somehow still manages to have one of the warmest, brightest grins dancing on his lips. It’s faint, not nearly as overbearing, yet still wholesome in itself._  
   
_He doesn’t even need to look at her. Even with his eyes trained on the landscape far into the horizon, peeking through the windowpanes of the room, she still enjoys looking right at him. It’s a view that makes her feel slightly better, even at her lowest._  
   
_“I see a lot of things, Tash. I think you’re gonna have to be way more specific,” he quips._  
   
_She breathes. “I have no job. I have no family. I have no purpose, no place in this world,” the young spy elaborates. Clint turns his attention to her, utterly unfazed. Of course, they’ve had this conversation before. A million times before, and then some. She often wonders how he isn’t ticked off by it yet. Sometimes she brings it up just to get a reaction that never comes. “My body isn’t mine, and neither is my mind.”_  
   
_He hums quietly, and blinks at her as she speaks._  
   
_“Why do you want this?”_  
   
_“I just do,” his reply comes immediately, along with a subtle nod._  
   
_“Why?”_  
   
_“It’s you, Tasha,” says the archer. His eyes are right on her, never wavering. “Always, ever since the day I met you.”_  
   
_“I don’t think it’s worth it.”_  
   
_“I promise you, it is.”_  
   
_Natasha hasn’t depended on another human being for simple comforts for a long time now. She can count the years, but not the months. But the simplest affirmations through his words and his promises are the reasons that keep her going._  
   
_Her heart doesn’t swell like it should, her head doesn’t race with anything else other than anxiety and despair. Her mind is a cloud and her eyes have the lights off. It’s easy to live alone and forget to turn on the lights. It’s easy to come home to an empty house and wade through the obscene darkness, feel one’s way to the refrigerator for an ice-cold beer, and forget to close the refrigerator door._  
   
_Listening to Clint, being dependent on him, it’s like a breath of fresh air that she’s somehow forgotten all about, in the journey from then to now. It’s like having someone around to turn the lights on for you, so you don’t trip over your own feet. It’s having that someone to help you close the fridge door when you’re too busy forgetting about the little things._  
   
_A year ago, they had moved in together. Three months ago, she had told him that she’d hated him to bits for cutting her down. Today, his presence is a safe space. A messy turn of events, of course, not unlike everything else in her life, except that this strangely turned out better than she had ever expected._  
   
_Of course, her life is a sick lie. A disease. Nothing good has ever come of it, and everything that’s good always goes away, one way or another. By her own hand, or someone else’s._  
   
_The feeling she feels in her stomach is strange. It’s not ice-cold, and it’s not furious fire. It’s not heavy, yet not light. It’s neither here, nor there. She can’t quite place the way it feels, to be honest, nor what it means. She hasn’t known this in ages, and it’s this very fact that tells her exactly what it is._  
   
_Natasha rests her head on the man’s broad shoulder, positioned perfectly right in the nook of his neck. He shifts, tucks her under his strong jaw._  
   
_She chews softly on her bottom lip. She rolls the flesh of her own lip between her teeth, a thing she does when she’s deep in thought. All tangled up right by his one occupied arm, her fingernails pick at the fabric of his shirt. “Can I tell you something?”_  
   
_She can almost hear the smile in his voice. “Anything,” the man replies._  
   
_Knowing him, and them, Natasha can guess that he’s reminiscing a time where she would tell him nothing at all. She can guess that he’s thinking about exactly how far they’ve come now._  
   
_“I’m scared,” she admits._  
   
_With her ear against the surface of his skin, the young redhead can hear the resounding chortle rattle about his chest. “You, scared?” He poses the question, incredulous. “Of what?”_  
   
_“Getting out,” the way she says it is almost shameful. “What if I’m not ready? What if I can’t do this? What if I need more time?”_  
   
_“They can’t hold you forever, Tasha.”_  
   
_“Maybe they should.”_  
   
_“I think that the fact that you’re afraid means that you’re more well than you were.”_  
   
_“I think the fact that I’m afraid means that I’m weak. And stupid. And it means I’m not ready.”_  
   
_“I don’t think you’ll ever feel ready,” he shrugs. “And you’re a lot of things, Tash, but weak isn’t one of them. Neither stupid. Not by a long shot.”_  
   
_She pulls away from him, to spare him a quick knowing glance. “You’re only saying that to make me feel better. But what if-“ She pauses._  
   
_He cocks an eyebrow. “What if, what?”_  
   
_She swallows against the lump rising in her throat. “What if this is it?”_  
   
_“It?”_  
   
_“What if this is the best it’ll ever get?” She elaborates. All she can think about are the three times that her medications haven’t worked yet. Three times that she’d had to get her prescription swapped out for something else. Three times of utter failure. “What then? What happens next?”_  
   
_They share a beat, and he somehow stretches that beat into a lifetime of seconds, all just to look at her. His eyes sweep right over her, her hair, her wild eyes, the angled tip of her nose, her small Cupid’s bow._  
   
_Then, he leans over and pecks her right on the crown of her head. By some sort of miracle, he never catches her hair in his mouth. There’s an inquisitive, yet strangely brazen, look coloring his features the moment he pulls away._  
   
_“That’s a pretty fuckin’ huge question, Tasha,” he remarks, a troubled grin dancing on his lips. Then the trouble wastes away, dissipates into nothing. “Well, we’ll... take it day by day. We’ll do it together. And if it really is what it is, then we’ll deal with that too,” Clint describes warmly._  
   
_She spares him an unsure stare, and for a moment too long. “You’ll grow sick of me.”_  
   
_“A hundred percent,” the archer quips back, his grin stretching wider. She sighs in response and rests her head back in the spot where it had been just moments before. He rests his warm hand on her knee, giving her a slight squeeze. “It’ll be okay soon. We’ll be okay.”_  
   
_She drops her gaze, from the horizon beyond the window, to the floor. “What if you’re wrong?”_  
   
_He takes a beat. “Then I... I promise I’ll be okay. You won’t have to worry.”_  
   
_Natasha smiles a quaint smile, perhaps even offers up a bit of a bare chuckle. She hums back in response, the only response, and he draws circles into the skin of her knee with his thumb._  
   
_The young redhead eventually catches the archer’s calloused fingers in her own, intertwines them in hers, and then she brings them to her lips. She kisses his fingers, then keeps them to herself._  
 

* * *

   
For a man that had spent the bulk of his tumultuous two years alone and about the world, the former archer didn’t do too well with little company. Perhaps that was why those two years were that awful, to a point where he could barely recognize himself in a mirror anymore.  
   
He was always more of a jolly, sarcastic, social man, with a knack for quips and jokes. It was where he thrived best, and shone the most.  
   
But the end of the world wasn’t the best time for clap-backs and shit jokes. And neither was the death of one’s entire family, of course — a wife, and three kids, all gone with the wind.  
   
Clint had spent the first couple of days settling back into his old apartment in Bed-Stuy. He wasn’t ready to head back to the compound yet, and Natasha had understood. He came home to an empty apartment that should’ve been inhabited by an old friend and protege, Kate, and his best bud Lucky.  
   
There was nothing more warm and homely than coming home to a barren apartment, wasn’t there?  
   
He had sighed to himself, readily putting together the idea that Kate had been stolen from him by the snap too, along with his dog. The initial thought made him angry, and then it left him empty. He tried his best for four long nights before he decided to move out from the tragic reminder of an apartment, and into Natasha’s abode in Brooklyn Heights instead.  
   
At least, with Natasha’s apartment, he knew that she was just somewhere else. Not gone like the rest of them, but alive and just elsewhere.  
   
He stayed on another two weeks, her living situation feeling more cut-and-dry than before. And cut and dry and monotonous felt like home, like the sorry apartment that he’d left behind in Tokyo. There was a slight stale stench that he’d gotten rid of by cracking open a window.  
   
Eventually, once he had overstayed his welcome in both empty apartments and things began turning a little bleak, Clint finally made his return to the compound on day twenty-one. Despite the hustle and bustle that he would’ve expected about the esteemed compound, the space was weirdly empty. Barren hallways, lifeless living rooms, and every meeting room seemed untouched. He’d even taken the scenic route to swing by the labs, only to find them uninhabited.  
   
It was in that moment, that moment of absolute silence whilst staring into empty chairs around the table, that Clint honestly wondered where everyone had gone. Did they just retire and disband? Were they taken by the snap? Then, why was Natasha still here? Perhaps she was holding onto something she couldn’t bear to leave, or someone. Or many someone’s.  
   
She never did tell him how bad things really were back home, or how much they’d lost.  
   
After a lot more pacing about the expanse space, Clint eventually sought her out at the range. Three wings away and on the fourth floor in the west-most building, the range was a large multi-purpose training space that was equipped for distance weaponry. He could only assume that Tony had had the former archer, Natasha, and a handful of other gunslingers in mind when he put this place together.  
   
Funnily enough, for whatever Tony Stark had done to contribute to him ending up on house arrest, Clint missed the man. Just as dearly as the rest of them, his second family.  
   
Even with her back towards him, the man could tell that his best friend was in terrible shape today. He could tell by the tension in her shoulders and her back, which left them both stiff and rock solid.  
   
She had emptied her magazine within seconds, all trained towards the same spots on the target, all perfect shots across the five targets on the sheet. She released the catchment about as fast as she replaced the magazine with a new one, and then shoved it back in place. And again, with lightning speed, she drilled her rounds into the same sheet.  
   
The target sheet, about four more magazines away from being shredded to pieces, was telling enough — either Natasha had something on her mind, was in a shit mood, or it was a grand combo of both mashed together.  
   
After offloading that last magazine, the blonde swiftly flicked on the safety and slammed the firearm down onto the assembly table beside her. The entire range — which was honestly massive in size, compared to the ones that they’d had back on any campus in SHIELD, headquarters included — resonated with a sharp bang of metal, just about as loud as the bang of a fired gun.  
   
He flinched at the sound. His ears had gotten a little more sensitive over the past two years. Something about not sleeping nearly enough, and constantly being the equivalent of two sleepless nights away from a failing heart.  
   
“сука блять,” she spat the expletive sharply beneath her own breath, in tandem with the slam. He hadn’t heard her in her native tongue for far too long now, so the phrase felt oddly foreign to his ears.  
   
The archer watched quietly from a corner as she pulled a hand over her face. As her hand travelled from cheek to cheek. As her palm settled to linger over her nose and mouth, slightly trembling. Trembling hands never did keep the esteemed assassin from dealing out her best shots, with pinpoint accuracy and expert aim.  
   
Her other hand rested propped against her waist, and she turned to her left to look out the window. The entire left-side wall was a glass panel that revealed a panoramic view of the vast compound, and the nature that surrounded it all. It left the range brightly lit with natural light, a pretty sight for sore and tired eyes.  
   
After a couple of moments, Natasha finally pushed her headset off from atop her head, bringing it down to rest at the base of her neck. As he paced a little closer to where she stood by the window, the blonde now jumped at the sound of his footsteps. Startled, she wiped a hand over her face again, once more across both cheeks.  
   
“Hey,” Clint called out to her softly.  
   
She spun around to face him. At first glance, he could see that her sinuses were congested and her cheeks were swollen with fluid retention. There were unsightly shadows beneath both her eyes, and even her crescent eye bags had eye bags of their own.  
   
Thinking back, ‘terrible shape’ was a massive understatement. It was as if she hadn’t had good sleep in weeks. She had looked rather exhausted at the airport in Tokyo three weeks ago, sure, but in this very moment, she looked like death itself. And it had been years since he’d seen her this scattered.  
   
Natasha tried to smile as best she could. Her smile was minimal at best, despite an obvious, conscious effort for something better. “Hi.”  
   
“You okay?”  
   
“Yeah, I’m uh...” She trailed off. Then, she shook her head. “I’m fine. I’ll- I’ll be fine.”  
   
“You don’t look fine. If I’m being blunt, you look like shit.”  
   
Her brows furrowed into a slight, contemplative frown. “Then stop looking,” she said, a little sharper than expected. Then she collected herself carefully. “Or look in a mirror or something. You look as shit as I do.”  
   
“Oh, trust me, I’ve been looking,” Clint quipped back, the slightest lopsided smirk gracing his lips.  
   
To be fair, he wasn’t lying. He  _had_  been looking. His established daily pre-shower ritual consisted of a stare-down with the enemy in the mirror, the reflection of himself. Watching himself waste away — from grief, and anger, and insomnia, and a deep depression towards his circumstances — into something he couldn’t recognize was like a game to him.  
   
It was a game of How Low Can You Go with the bags beneath his eyes, and the way his heart constantly hung low and heavy in his chest. Same with his morals, and same with a lot of other things that had once made him a good person. Not the best game for his body count though, given his several murderous rampages as a result of ruthless vigilante work.  
   
Natasha contemplated his quip, and he could see exactly how hard her mind was working to unbox his words through her eyes. And then she scoffed, and then her chest rattled with a chuckle, and her lips turned from a sullen sulk to more than just a hint of a genuine smile.  
   
The smiles where she bared any teeth at all were few and far between. And having known her for nearly two decades, he would know. A proper, wholehearted, authentically warm Duchenne smile; he liked those. Not a quaint smirk, or a tight-lipped grin, or any of that second-rate shit that everybody — and yet nobody at all — knew was part of Natasha’s arsenal. Her bag of tricks, and one of many. No, none of that.  
   
It was warming whenever she had those, those genuine smiles, to see her radiant. Back when she had scarlet hair that ran the reddest red right over her shoulders, and with a smile like that and the occasional wonder in her eyes, it was as if she was a woman kissed by fire. And he’d reveled in every moment that he watched her burn.  
   
Now, it wasn’t as much fun watching her burn out, and that was exactly what was happening.  
   
Her toothed grin easily dampened back down something more somber. Within seconds, with a few residual chuckles thrown in, it went easy. Her lips were pulled right back over her teeth, once again tight-lipped and humorless.  
   
_смех без причины - признак дурачины_ , he remembered her saying once before. Laughter without reason was a sign of a fool, and she wasn’t a fool.  
   
“You haven’t slept much, have you?” He asked.  
   
“No,” she said, watching him with a hardened look in her eye. “You?”  
   
He shook his head. “No,” he said. Because, how could he? Every waking hour was a nightmare, and those were still light years better than whatever he saw in his dreams, in his sleep. His family, alive. Joy. Hope. A part of himself that he’d since lost.  
   
Perhaps his face had twisted. Maybe the glint in his eye had turned into something else, if anything at all. Natasha stared at him, her watchful eyes watching him watch her back. They were usually calm and collected in moments of silence, and they liked to share the serenity of it between themselves.  
   
For some reason, this was different. It was tense, and uncomfortable, and completely wrong. Something, or everything, was way off.  
   
Then again, so much had changed between them.  
   
She kept her eyes on him, trying to peer through. Her eyes grew glassy the longer she stared. As he blinked back, this time with more concern, she turned her gaze to the ground. “Wanna talk about it?” He offered.  
   
“No,” Natasha frowned again, and pursed her lips into a fine line. Her gaze went from the ground to out the window.  
   
“You know you-“  
   
The former archer started towards his partner, a sturdy hand reaching out. He pretended not to notice when she shied away. She had her arms wrapped around her torso, and tucked them further into herself as she moved, as if she couldn’t get any smaller.  
   
She maneuvered around the assembly shelf and got her hands busy with her firearm. “Have you gone back to the farm yet?” She segued abruptly.  
   
He shook his head. “Not yet.”  
   
“Haven’t had the time?”  
   
“Not ready,” he said solemnly.  
   
Her busied hands slowed to a pause as she looked back up at him. Their exchange led to her eyes meeting his face, and his eyes meeting her hands. “I don’t think you’ll ever be ready.”  
   
Clint scoffed quietly to himself. How characteristic of Natasha to be that blunt, and only ever around him. The comment felt both heart-warming, like the warm and comforting presence of an old friend and all their little ticks, and also a little bitter, like it was a case of bad timing.  
   
And bittersweet. He had said that to her before, more than once, whenever he had to nudge her in the direction she was meant to go. Whether it was leaving the hospital, both stints at rehab, four of her first meetings, coming to terms with each and every bad thought, feeling and thing that was a part of her life, and returning to work after that. He always said it, and she always listened.  
   
Now more than ever, it was clear that she had.  
   
She returned her focus to her hands again after a significant beat. “I went back, you know.”  
   
“You told me.” He remembered.  
   
“I couldn’t bear not to,” she continued. “It was the only place that I figured I’d feel... something. I didn’t want to at first, though, and then it was all I wanted to do.”  
   
“Like always,” he noted.  
   
“I came in through the clearing,” she said, and he could feel his stomach churn at the anticipation of what she was about to say. Then again, deep down, he already knew the words that were about to come out of her mouth. “I saw it, all of it, where I assumed it’d happened.”  
   
It — picnic mats and rattan baskets. Half-eaten sandwiches and crushed juice boxes and emptied-out soda cans. A target board mounted against the bark of a sturdy tree that had been there longer than he’d ever been alive. It. All of it. Of course she fucking did.  
   
The man chewed on the inside of his cheek, being unable to answer.  
   
“I saw the board on the tree. Lila was getting good, wasn’t she? Really good.”  
   
There was a buzzing at the back of his head, a familiar buzz that had droned on in silence for most of his life, only to reprise in volume and depth in the worst moments of his life. In his worst headspace, the buzz was audible. It was loud, and he could feel it growing, and he could feel himself getting more and more frustrated.  
   
Whether it was himself, or with Natasha blatantly attempting to fish answers out of him — hook, line and sinker — he didn’t know. To be fair, he didn’t really care.  
   
All he did care about was that he was angry, and he had been for so long, and he didn’t like how that felt but it was the only real thing he ever did manage to feel these days.  
   
Clint didn’t respond, and Natasha took it anyway.  
   
As soon as she was done fiddling with her firearm, the blonde crossed her arms and stared straight at the hollow spot in between his collarbones. “Have you nocked one since... you know?”  
   
“No,” he replied quietly. “Haven’t touched one.”  
   
“You think you still have your aim?”  
   
“No. I don’t do that anymore. I wouldn’t know.”  
   
“Would you try?”  
   
He stared at her as he pondered over her question, the buzz in his head droning in as white noise in the background. He stared at her, maybe a little too harshly, trying to work out the intent behind her every word.  
   
Then, not long after, he bit back a breath and dropped his gaze. “I’m not that person anymore.”  
   
“Don’t be stupid. It’s a part of who you are.”  
   
“Not anymore.”  
   
She frowned. “Why?”  
   
“Does it even matter?”  
   
“It does,” she said.  
   
Clint sighed grimly. “Not to me,” he then replied.  
   
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”  
   
“What were you expecting to hear, Natasha? Huh?” He frowned, his tone hardening just as much as her own eyes began to. “All these fucking questions that you don’t want to hear the answer to. Are you looking for something?”  
   
It was in that very moment that he felt it — the dull heaviness in his chest, rivaled by the electricity coursing through the tips of his fingers. His mind ran a hefty marathon as he stood so extremely still, working in extreme overdrive. His head picked apart every word, his ears ringing, his heart drumming ten times as fast as it should’ve been.  
   
He could feel this blind, mindless rage begin to descend upon him like it always did, the way it always had been for the past two years.  
   
For some reason, a reason that didn’t make any sense at all, it felt like she was the enemy here.  
   
And he fucking hated it, and he fucking hated his guts for feeling it, and he fucking hated the person that he was now because of it.  
   
He shut his eyes, breathing through his anger — in through his nose, out through his mouth. Over and over and over again, until finally, “the world changed, okay? It went to shit and I went with it. I’m not the same person as I was. I can’t be.”  
   
Glancing at her again, he could watch her eyes flicker between a steel, stone-cold gaze and a glassy, watering mess. “I don’t believe that.”  
   
“Well,” he scoffed lightly. She tucked her arms closer around her torso. “It’s not about what you want, or what I want, is it?”  
   
Natasha chewed on her bottom lip, the way she always did when she couldn’t find the right words. The way she always did when she was in her head, and in her feelings. The world changed, and it was almost funny how some things never did.  
   
She blinked, one, two, three times, the odd look of listlessness in her eyes going from distant to hurt, to everything else in between. She swallowed. “I think I should go,” she started, dropping her gaze to her own feet shuffling around him.  
   
For some reason, that ticked him off massively.  
   
“I don’t know what you want from me, Natasha,” he queried from behind her as she was walking out of the range.  
   
She halted, hesitating to take another step. “I don’t know, Clint. Something. Anything,” she said. For a statement that seemed so assertive, it felt otherwise. “I just want to hear  _you_.”  
   
“Well I’d say the same for you,” Clint commented back, his words unintentionally coming off harsher than intended. He could tell by the way she was taken aback by his remark, in the slight upturn of her brows. “You’re acting all weird and asking all of these questions, but you won’t even talk to me about what’s on your mind.”  
   
“I just don’t want to talk about it, okay? I’m sorry.”  
   
“You used to tell me everything, all the good stuff, and the bad. I understand that I’ve been gone all this time, but I’m here now and I’m trying to be there for you on shit days like this, and you’re not throwing me a line, Tasha,” he shared his frustrations. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you don’t sound like you either.”  
   
“It’s nothing you have to worry about. It doesn’t... it doesn’t concern you,” she replied, increasingly flustered.  
   
“That’s bullshit,” he argued. “I’m here now, like you wanted, but now you won’t even give me the time of day. I don’t understand.”  
   
“Are you unhappy here?”  
   
“I’m not unhappy.”  
   
“Do you want to leave? Is that it?”  
   
“I didn’t say that.”  
   
“Then, what?” Natasha argued back with an edge to her voice. “What are you so mad about?”  
   
“I’m just fucking frustrated with all of this! You told me to come home, and I did-“  
   
She cut him off, a newfound terseness to her tone. “No, I gave you a choice, Clint. You said no, and I left,” Natasha corrected. Her voice was thickening, like it always did when she was trying to bite back her tears. “Then you decide to show up and come back here, and things aren’t going back to normal like you’d thought, and that’s my fault? Just like how every bad thing that’s ever happened to you is my fucking fault, right?”  
   
He scowled at her. “You know I didn’t mean it that way.”  
   
There was an instant look of obvious hurt that colored her features in its entirety.  
   
Her words had to reverberate in his headspace a second time around before he realized exactly what she had meant, and then he could feel his anger dissipate all at once. In its place, dread. “You know I don’t mean it that way,” he repeated.  
   
“You know what, Clint,” she grimaced quietly. “If you want to leave, you should just leave. After two years, I got used to you not being around. And that doesn’t feel like it’s changed so far, so you should quit while you’re ahead.”  
   
And that felt like a well-deserved slap in the face.  
   
“I don’t want to leave, Tasha. I won’t. I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m sorry I got mad. I just- I...” Clint’s words trailed off, and he sighed.  
   
She didn’t respond, but neither did she walk away.  
   
And when he looked up at her again, to catch a clue from her expression, she offered the slightest sigh, bothered, tormented and inching towards a bit more than just a little sad.  
   
He recognized that, and while his mind hadn’t exactly caught up to the idea, his body instinctively had. It was a cold stone sinking in his gut, chilling him to his core. The man talked a lot about having become a different person, and unrecognizable character, but one thing was certain — seeing Natasha like this, more than just sad, still made him feel like absolute shit.  
   
To be specific, it made him worry.  
   
She slackened the tension in her arms and let them drop to her sides. As he tried again, and failed again, to put his words together, he worked to close the distance.  
   
“I... I just don’t understand what it is that I’m supposed to do here, that’s all,” Clint admitted, and he searched her face for any kind of understanding. “I just need you to talk to-“  
   
He didn’t realize that his words had cut out, as soon as his gaze made its way past her shoulders and down her arm.  
   
It was a flurry of emotions, seeing it. Madness, mixed with fear. An off sort of feeling in his gut that he couldn’t really place. A feeling unlike anything he had felt in the last two years. It was as if he had loaded bullets, but no firing pin. Everything he felt, all stopped in its tracks.  
   
When he saw it, it was faint. It was faint enough that she hadn’t made an effort to cover it up with concealer or sleeves, but obvious enough for his eyes only.  
   
Right on the inside of her elbow joint, Clint spotted it. Or rather, them. A small cluster of discolored, scarred over callouses right over where her veins had since disappeared. He could spot two tinier, less blatant scars down the remaining length of her arm as well, down the same vein.  
   
Another slightly larger one, right by her upper wrist, had camouflaged itself as pigmentation that he knew hadn’t been there before.  
   
On instinct, he grabbed her wrist. Glancing between him and her own arm, Natasha‘s breath caught. She stilled, and he glanced back up at her. As distraught as his insides felt, he couldn’t find the words to match. They were somehow lost on him.  
   
When he did, he found her staring right at him with the most unnerving look in her eye, like a kid whose hands were just caught in the cookie jar. Like a deer in the headlights of a speeding car on the motorway.  
   
Like fear, as if she was waiting for a shoe to drop, a voice to be raised, like she’d just been slapped in the face and was waiting for the next one.  
   
The man’s jaw dropped open, a cue for words to come tumbling out. There was none.  
   
_Fifteen years_ , he’d wanted to say.  _Fifteen fucking years, Tasha_.  _What the fuck did you do?_  
   
And maybe he did. He couldn’t tell.  
   
She swallowed. “Wow,” her tone soured even further than before. Just a split second before she stonewalled him, he could’ve sworn that her eyes had been beginning to tear up.  
   
He pressed his eyes shut in response, just trying to wrap his head around all of it. “Tasha, I...”  
   
Clint couldn’t continue. He didn’t know what he would say, if he would say anything at all. Words, the right words, didn’t really come easy to him these days.  
   
And if she had been beginning to soften in his presence just moments before, just like he had been beginning to soften in hers, it was obvious that that was scrapped now. The tension had returned to her features and her physique, and unknowingly so did his, and so did the uncomfortable rift between them.  
   
She pulled her arm back to herself and kept them wound tight against her torso, and it was easy enough, given that his grip was loose. Clint found that he was in too much disbelief towards the situation to have been holding onto her any tighter.  
   
“I can’t do this. I’m done,” she said quietly, all right under her own breath. “I’m tired of trying to make this make sense, because I can’t.”  
   
He sighed heavily. “What do you mean? What do you mean you’re done?”  
   
“I don’t feel like I know you anymore, or us. I thought I did, I tried to ask the right questions. When you came back, I thought that things would fall right back into place as we’d left it, but it didn’t. I’m tired of trying to figure you, and us, out.”  
   
“So that’s it?” He asked. “Just like that?”  
   
She held her breath, and he could see the slightest tremble of her jaw. She couldn’t even look at him anymore. Whether it was out of pure anger, or shame, or discomfort, Natasha kept her gaze trained on the floor by her feet.  
   
Even when she would look up, she would look beside him, or right past him, anywhere but at him. She nodded as she did, “that’s it.”  
   
“You can’t keep pushing people away when things get bad, Natasha,” he remarked.  
   
It was a bit more bite than bark, a little mad, and he couldn’t tell if he himself had meant it the way that it came across.  
   
He heard her swallow against a lump in her throat. “I’m not the one doing the pushing,” she replied. “You left me first.”  
   
And then she turned her back to him, and he didn’t stop her, and it wasn’t long after before Natasha was gone. All he could think to do was stare blankly as she did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New phone, who dis?
> 
> Sorry this took awhile, been caught up with life. Will try to post more regularly, but in the meantime, hope you enjoyed this!


	5. We Take Care Of Our Own

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has given her so many concessions, so much leeway, and far too much power over him. Not forgetting the fact that he’d gone soft for her from the very first moment that they’d met, he’s only starting to realize that Natasha has him wound so tightly around her finger that it hurts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _“When you're here with me,_  
>  _“You're not here with me._  
>  — _Heart Of Stone_ by _Iko_

**_New York, July 2005_**  
   
_Today, he comes prepared. His preparation comes with a bunch of things — research papers, advice from friends, a couple of WebMD & Mayo Clinic web articles, and a shitload of personal experience. He has never been more well-prepared in his life._  
   
_Still, it leaves him anxious._  
   
_That’s another thing that he knows he ought to feel. It’s part of his research. It’s part of what he knows._  
   
_His mother once got a solid shiner from when she’d confronted his father about his drinking habit. His brother once threatened to cut his legs out from right beneath him, when he himself had tried to intervene with Barney’s drug use. He’d been thirteen at the time._  
   
_Clint hasn’t seen his partner in over a week. To be honest, these days he only sees her every once in a while, when they cross paths at work. And they goddamn live together._  
   
_He spends half of his time at work, and the other half at home, and it’s just as if she has a bunch of drawers and shelves of her own stuff but she doesn’t live here anymore._  
   
_Whenever she’s gone for more than 48 hours at a time, he drops her texts and tries to call her more than once. It’s not strange for her to drop right off the face of the earth and go radio silent for days at a time, days that he knows she isn’t on the job, only to leave him with the dreaded feeling that she might be dead in a ditch, a back alley, some crack house, or in a bathroom stall somewhere with a needle in her arm._  
   
_It’s only either when she texts him back, or sees him at home or at work days after, that he knows that she’s alive and... well, well enough._  
   
_Her frequent absences leave him feeling lonely, more isolated from the world than he ever intended to be. And it doesn’t help that every time he closes his eyes, he catches glimpses of her cold body hanging by her neck in a bathroom he doesn’t use anymore. He’s kept it locked for a year now, and she picks the lock open every fucking time she’s around._  
   
_It’s_   _so exhausting that he doesn’t even try getting the lock back on anymore._  
   
_Clint sits on a bar stool by his kitchen counter, feet tapping nervously against the foot rail. He’s been sitting there for three hours since waking up to an empty bed. He’s due for an assignment meeting at twelve noon that he can’t be bothered to attend._  
   
_At the same time, it’s stunts like that that’s been prompting Phil to threaten to bench him and send him for yet another psych evaluation. Every time he points his finger at his partner and goes, ‘_ she first’ _, the archer knows that she lies through all of it and gets off easy._  
   
_He simply can’t figure out just how every single person is being so blind to what’s been happening with Natasha, and he wants to scream it at the top of his goddamn lungs._  
   
_But he doesn’t._  
   
_He respects and loves her enough not to, to intervene on the down-low and give her a mile to sort herself out. He doesn’t, even though it feels like the wrong thing to do._  
   
_The last time he’d kept things on the down-low, she had hung herself in his bathroom. Doing this again though, it leaves him haunted by this constant, looming feeling that the same thing is going to happen once more. It leaves him knowing but dreading that history is going to repeat itself, and that he won’t be able to handle it if — or when — it does._  
   
_So he sits, prepared. If she happens to come home this morning, like she hadn’t this past week, Clint has a perfectly mapped out idea of how the morning is going to go. He has an agenda, a thoroughly revised series of talking points that he plans to work through like bullet points on a presentation. Even with all this preparation, though, he can’t help but not know what to expect._  
   
_He never does, not with her._  
   
_He can’t even stomach the coffee right in front of him, and nearly breaks the cup in his hand from a tense and distracted grip._  
   
_It’s a quarter past ten when she comes through the door, unnervingly chipper in comparison to him. Other than looking a tad bit exhausted, like she’d spent the night out, she looks put together._  
   
_“Hey hot stuff,” Natasha calls out from the doorway, a grin evident. Her fingers visibly fumble with pulling her key from the lock, but she settles it swiftly enough. “Who gave you the right to sit over there looking like a whole snack?”_  
   
_“Just coffee,” he places the rim of his coffee mug against his bottom lip and mumbles right into it._  
   
_She shuts the door behind her and crosses the living room to meet him by the kitchen. He sets his mug down. She presses a kiss against his lips, and then another peck against his cheek. Her fingers linger by the side of his face, working themselves through his hair. He doesn’t realize just how tense he’s been the entire morning, until the sensation of her touch effects a chill right down his spine, and a fuzzy feeling in his shoulders._  
   
_In moments like these, she seems almost normal, and perfect in every sense of the word._  
   
_Clint hums quietly at the feeling of her fingernails running down his scalp. “Good morning,” she murmurs between them. They’re close enough that he can feel her words on his own lips._  
   
_“Morning.”_  
   
_She pulls away and gives him a once over. “You sleep well? You’re tense, and you sound tired.”_  
   
_The archer shakes his exhaustion away. “I’m fine,” he smiles back. He can’t tell if it comes across weakly. At least she doesn’t call him out on anything, so he assumes it comes across fine._  
   
_“Well,” Natasha pats him on his shoulder, giving him a squeeze and one more quick peck on the lips before she really pulls further away. “I’m glad I caught you this morning. It feels like I haven’t had a moment with you in forever,” she continues on, swiftly disappearing into the bedroom._  
   
_“Did you come home last night?” He calls out. He knows she didn’t._  
   
_“Yeah, I was in Boston the whole day, running intelligence. You were already asleep when I got back, didn’t wanna wake you,” she replies. “I got your texts though.” Texts that she didn’t reply._  
   
_He can hear the shuffle of her feet and the rustle of skin against clothes. “What time did you get back?”_  
   
_“Nearly two in the morning.”_  
   
_“You weren’t here when I woke up earlier.”_  
   
_“I went on a run.” He hears the shower start to run now._  
   
_He gets up and moves to the bedroom, and sits beside her pile of dirty clothes. He looks over at the pile. “In street clothing?”_  
   
_“Oh, no. I mean I went for a run earlier. Like around eight?” She chuckles dismissively. “Anyway, I changed and rushed out again for an errand after that.”_  
   
_Clint purses his lips. He’s been awake and sitting by the kitchen since seven sharp. “Oh, okay.”_  
   
_“So, how’s work been?” The redhead queries further. He doesn’t manage to get a word in before she pipes up again. “It’s so frustrating when we’re not running the same jobs. I’m still trying to get used to it, if I’m being honest.”_  
   
_He hums back. “Work’s been fine. Nothing too major, I guess,” he hasn’t exactly been putting in the effort to show up, either. He’s missed three meetings now, from being hot and bothered about trying to locate her whenever she decides to blink out of existence for days. “I’ve got this job in Montenegro. It’s a pain in the ass. You?”_  
   
_“Nick keeps sending me to Russia, of all places. Or like Ukraine, or Belarus. Moldova, at times, but you get it. If I didn’t know any better, I would think that it was his underhanded way of telling me to fuck off back to the ruskies,” she replies, her voice barely hovering over the sound of the shower water hitting her feet._  
   
_“Nah, you know Fury loves you. He doesn’t say it, but he’d go toe-to-toe with the Russians if they ever tried to steal you back.”_  
   
_She chuckles aloud. “Mmhmm, I know.”_  
   
_Then, she pokes her head out, and he can see suds of shampoo residue in her hair, like a foam crown. “Also, Coulson keeps trying to get me to go for these psych evals, like every fortnight. I’ve gone for like... four. That’s weird, right?”_  
   
_He feels his own heart sink, and he doesn’t know if he has gone fully pale. He nods._  
   
_Natasha pops back into the shower. “Yeah, I figured the same,” she hums bemusedly to herself. “Not that it bothers me, though. If I had nerves, he’d be getting on them. But I don’t, so.”_  
   
_“Maybe he’s just worried,” he reasons. “You know Coulson, always worrying about everybody.”_  
   
_“That’s more you than him, babe,” she rebuts with a joke. It makes sense. It is sense. “But whatever. Gone for four, passed for four. Whatever keeps me here, right?”_  
   
_He hums back, briefly agreeing. “He said you missed a couple of mission briefs?”_  
   
_“I’ve just been busy, you know. In between work, and all of those therapy sessions, and meeting up with the realtor to put my apartment back on the market, and all of the other stuff. It’s been really hectic. I catch myself up though.”_  
   
_“You sound busy.”_  
   
_The shower stops, and he hears her towel slip off the rack as she grabs it. “Wish I wasn’t,” she says, stepping out and smiling sadly at him from the en-suite. “You know what? I really miss this. Talking like this, just the two of us. I miss it.”_  
   
_Standing there, the towel consumes her petite frame even more than it used to. Her collarbones poke right out of her shoulders, and he can even see the contours to her front ribs reaching outwards from her sternum. He can see the ones on her back too, as she turns away from him and disappears to the other end of the bathroom._  
   
_He doesn’t really know what hurts more — that she’s getting skinnier than she already is, probably from the drugs, or that he sees her infrequently enough for the difference to feel that drastic, definitely because of the drugs._  
   
_“Funny that we share the same bed, but it’s like I never see you anymore,” he says tinily but honestly, all under his breath._  
   
_“Sorry,” she comes back into full view, now having thrown on a cashmere sweater pulled all the way up to her wrists; it’s 94 degrees out. She’s stepping into her jeans, one leg at a time. “What was that? I missed that.”_  
   
_He clears his throat. She smiles when he does, still working her legs into the denim. “I just said that I missed you too. Feels like I never see you.”_  
   
_Natasha pulls a face as she meets him by the bed, looking down at him. He looks right back up at her. She runs the fingers of one hand through the hair atop his head. “It’s not that bad,” she dismisses nonchalantly. “I mean, I guess we see each other enough.”_  
   
_“Enough?” He probes grimly. “I haven’t seen you in seven days, Tasha. You haven’t come home for seven days.”_  
   
_She looks away, amused, and picks up her pile of dirty clothes. “That’s stupid. I’ve come home,” she begins with a tone of voice that’s light yet incredulous. With the pile in hand, she slips skillfully into her own boots and walks with the zippers down. “You’re always just sound asleep when I’m around,” she reasons back, disappearing out of the room again._  
   
_The archer follows her to the laundry basket. “Yeah, except I know you didn’t come home last night.” Her amusement seems to drain right out of her face as the seconds tick by. “Or the night before. And the night before that. And I could continue.”_  
   
_Still not looking at him, she tosses her dirty clothes into the basket, leaving it to join the rest of the heap. “Like I said, you’re always asleep when I come and go-“_  
   
_“I’ve been awake since seven. That’s before you went on your run, right?”_  
   
_She blinks. “Probably got the time wrong. I was tired, I didn’t really care to take a look.”_  
   
_“Because you came back late?” Nearly two she’d said._  
   
_“Yeah.”_  
   
_He sighs solemnly, and he can see his partner beginning to feel out of sorts. “I came home at three in the morning, Tasha,” he calls her bluff. Her growing discomfort is so obvious that he can almost feel it himself. “You weren’t here. And you weren’t here either when I woke up.”_  
   
_“You’ve been keeping tabs on me?” She smiles inquisitively, but is obviously starting to get a little flustered. “I probably just got the time wrong, you know? I haven’t changed the time zones for the clock on my phone, and I’ve been all over the globe and just didn’t seem worth it.”_  
   
_“You haven’t been home in over a week, and it’s not the first time. I’m always worried sick,” Clint says assertively. “Half the time I don’t even know where you are, or if you’re alive. And I call you after you’re gone for over two days, and you don’t pick up. You only reply to my texts four days after. And I know it isn’t work because I know what missions you do.”_  
   
_Natasha straightens out in retaliation to his words. Any chirpiness that she’d had just two moments ago has completely left her features and her posture now. Now, she almost looks defensive, and it’s what he’d expected._  
   
_Preparation._  
   
_She finally looks him in the eye, and this time he sees a complete stranger staring back at him. That, he wasn’t prepared for. “What the hell is this?”_  
   
_He swallows thickly. “I think we need to talk.”_  
   
_“No,” she says firmly. She grits her teeth and brushes past him._  
   
_“No?”_  
   
_“Look, I don’t have time for this,” Natasha complains as she makes her way down the hall. “Whatever the hell this is.”_  
   
_The archer — again — trails right behind her, all hot on her heels. “Make time,” he demands._  
   
_She doesn’t spare him another look as her fingers work to throw her hair into a bun by the mirror at the foyer. She passes his words off like selective listening, ignoring his instruction completely._  
   
_He doesn’t feel too confident about all of his preparation anymore. He calls her name the first time she doesn’t respond; he stands by the door when he does. When she lifts her jacket from the hook in the foyer and fits it on, he calls her name another time._  
   
_“I know what you’re doing, Natasha.”_  
   
_“Whatever the hell you think I’m doing, is probably not what I’m actually doing, so,” she dismisses with a straight face._  
   
_She tries pull the front door open, and he slams it back shut. She glares at him in return, fuming. The redhead looks like she’s seeing a shade of red that’s redder than the red in her own hair. He doesn’t like being subject to her type of anger, but has convinced himself that it’s a necessary evil in this current circumstance._  
   
_He can see her jaw set rigid. “What? Are you going to lock me in this apartment now?” Natasha remarks sharply. “I have a fucking meeting, Clint. Don’t be stupid.”_  
   
_“You don’t have a meeting.”_  
   
_“You don’t know that.”_  
   
_“I told you, I do.” Which is true, he does. Because on technicality, he’s still the assassin’s assigned SO. Even if just in passing like a bunch of junk mail, he’s across on every job that’s booked against her schedule. He’s always looped in. It’s only recently that he has really started reviewing them in detail, to know where she should be and where she isn’t. “You have a brief at four and are wheels up at seven. You have nowhere to be.”_  
   
_Natasha scoffs, glancing at the time on her phone. It’s twenty minutes to eleven. “I have everywhere to be.”_  
   
_“And where’s that, Williamsburg? Or do you prefer the one on the corner of 173rd and Audubon?”_  
   
_“I have no idea what you’re talking about. You sound insane.”_  
   
_“Then tell me that if I roll up your sleeves right now, that I won’t see the marks on your arm,” Clint challenges. He can feel his heart pulse in his own throat, to a point that it’s unsettling. He holds himself together. “Tell me I’m wrong, Tash. Because I would love to be wrong about this.”_  
   
_Natasha is a skilled liar. She has lied her way in and out of prisons. She has sold fake state secrets on behalf of the government, led federal agencies on wild goose chases, and spent years keeping up appearances on all of her covers._  
   
_She has passed every lie detector test that has come with a polygraph, an electrode and wire, a heart rate monitor. And not because she’s telling the truth, but because she lies through every question and is just that good._  
   
_By way of her faltering glare, the shallow breath that catches itself in her throat, and the way she shifts her weight from one foot to the other like she’s uncomfortable, Clint thinks a lot of things._  
   
_One — that maybe she’s not that good after all, or at least not for his gut. Two — that perhaps, in spite of everything, a part of her doesn’t want to lie to him. Just like the way that he loves her enough to always lie for her but never to her. Maybe she’s not even trying to hide it from him._  
   
_She doesn’t say anything, crosses her arms and looks to her feet._  
   
_“Like I said,” the archer starts. They share a beat. “We need to talk,” he tells her quietly._  
   
_“If you know what you know, then what’s there to talk about?” Natasha queries back with a frown._  
   
_“I want to know why.”_  
   
_“Does it really matter why?”_  
   
_“Yeah, Tasha. It really does,” he responds firmly. “You know how I feel about all of this.”_  
   
_Which she does. They’ve indulged in so many tough conversations. She knows about his father, and the constant state of fear that his own mother lived and died with. She knows how his brother died._  
   
_She knows exactly why he hasn’t touched a street drug since high school, and doesn’t like hospitals and clinics and medication. She knows why he limits himself to a maximum of one alcoholic beverage per night, if not less._  
   
_The redhead scoffs to herself, turning away from him and backing herself into the living room. She sits herself down on the armrest of the couch._  
   
_“Maybe that’s why I never told you about it,” she says, so matter-of-factly._  
   
_“I just don’t understand.”_  
   
_“Of course you don’t. You never do. You never could,” her tone escalates. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe you’re just not the best person to talk to about all of this?”_  
   
_He runs his fingers through his hair in frustration. “This is not about me-“_  
   
_“Hell, of course it’s about you!”_  
   
_“It’s about you. You and this thing you’re doing-”_  
   
_Natasha laughs aloud, and it kind of feels like a slap in the face. “How could this possibly not be about you, Clint?” She challenges. There’s a kind of power behind her each and every word, an odd sort of driving force, that he just can’t wrap his head around. “Look at you, you can’t even say the fucking words. And I’m supposed to talk to you about this, about what I’m doing?”_  
   
_The archer runs out of words. All of that supposed preparation feels like it’s gone right through him._  
   
_Maybe it’s her, and her god-given ability to turn from someone affectionate at one second, right into someone extremely toxic within the next._  
   
_Or maybe it’s him, being a complete pushover when it comes to Natasha. He has given her so many concessions, so much leeway, and far too much power over him. Not forgetting the fact that he’d gone soft for her from the very first moment that they’d met, he’s only starting to realize that Natasha has him wound so tightly around her finger that it hurts._  
   
_She shakes her head in utter disbelief. “God, you’re so full of shit sometimes, you know that?”_  
   
_Clint licks his lips that have gone chapped and dry. He feels flushed and flustered, but he steadies his breaths. “You’re an addict, Tasha. You have a drug habit, and you need to stop.”_  
   
_It doesn’t feel good saying the words. In fact, it leaves him feeling sick. Despite weeks of reading article after article, journal after journal, and getting advice from friends while referring to her at length — by way of “a friend of mine” or “someone I know” — all that preparation hasn’t helped the reality of it all to sink and settle in._  
   
_It’s that much easier to think about the facts exactly as they present themselves, as facts._  
   
_And then it’s impossibly tough to put an actual person, a person that he cares very much about, behind that. Even thinking about it, thinking about her together with it, leaves him with a heavy heart. The thought itself feels... dirty._  
   
_Clint is ashamed for feeling like that._  
   
_“Why should it matter to you what the hell I’m putting in my body?” The redhead prompts._  
   
_“Because I love you, and I care about you, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”_  
   
_Natasha looks back at him like he has just slapped her in the face with his words. She has a look of hurt plastered across her features, and presents with a grimace at what he’s just said. He has said nothing wrong, and somehow it feels like she’s comprehending it as nothing right. “So if I don’t stop, you can’t love me? Or you won’t?”_  
   
_He grits his teeth. “That’s not what I said-“_  
   
_“No, I know exactly what you meant.”_  
   
_“You’re getting it all wrong-“_  
   
_“It’s because of you, you know,” her words drip with animosity and with venom. It’s obvious that she’s choosing her words carefully, the ones that she knows will hit him where it hurts the most._  
   
_And yeah, it really fucking hurts to hear any of it._  
   
_“All of this, it’s because of you. All because you made a decision about my life for me a year ago, years ago, and every single day since then has been a horrible, constant, living nightmare,” Natasha continues._  
   
_Clint’s stomach drops like a stone. Any other ambient noise gets tuned right out as his ears begin to ring. His chest is tight. “You said you were getting better,” his voice is plain and low and barely a squeak._  
   
_“When have you ever taken me for my word?” The redhead scoffs. “It’s like you have selective fucking hearing and out of everything I’ve ever said, that’s all you hear. One stupid lie.”_  
   
_He swallows thickly. He doesn’t know what else to say. In between good nights and better days — now all a false pretense, he had been genuinely convinced that things were looking up._  
   
_“I’m not better. I’m not happy. The medications don’t work,” she admits honestly, and angrily. Like it’s his fault, like it’s always his fault. “You wanted me alive and you wanted me better, and I’m doing what I can to make you happy and that’s still not good enough for you, is it?”_  
   
_“Tasha, I-“_  
   
_“Nothing is ever good enough for you. And it’s really fucking hard to live with that, you know?”_  
   
_They share a long and tumultuous beat. And Clint can’t help but think about all of the ways that his initial, well thought-out plan has gone absolutely wrong in all of the worst ways. God, why did he even think in the first place that this confrontation, this intervention, was going to go down well with either of them?_  
   
_There’s a heaviness to his chest that he can’t shake, that’s weighing down his breaths. His head feels like it’s buried in sand. He feels like he’s about to keel over, and settles himself on one of the couch cushions._  
   
_The words barely reach his lips. “This isn’t you, Tasha. I know you, and this isn’t you.”_  
   
_“You don’t know me,” Natasha argues back. “You have an idea of me, an idea that makes you feel good, but that isn’t me, Clint.”_  
   
_He looks down at his own two feet, head hanging as he tries but fails to think straight, to think objectively, to think of things to say. She adjusts herself to face him, full-frontal._  
   
_She picks at her fingers defeatedly as well. They never really fight like this. “I try really hard to be the person you want me to be, because I know how much that means to you and I love you, but that isn’t me,” she explains. “It’s painful, and I’m miserable, and this makes it easier. This is why.”_  
   
_“I never wanted you to do that for me.”_  
   
_“I wanted to make you happy. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to feel the way you’ve always wanted me to.”_  
   
_“There are better ways about this that don’t start and end with a needle in your arm.”_  
   
_“Is there?” She frowns and sniffles, like she’s fighting back actual tears. “Sometimes I look at you and I feel nothing. I feel like a black hole of nothing, and it makes me feel like a bad person.”_  
   
_The archer wipes a hand over his face. His right foot taps mindlessly against the floorboards, each tap a mirror of his growing despair and desperation. “I don’t care if you feel apathetic towards me, Tasha, or if you hate me. It really doesn’t matter to me as long as you’re well.”_  
   
_“Then what about me? What about how I feel about it? Because it matters, to me,” she retorts sharply. “I hate that I feel nothing when I look at you, when I know I should feel everything. I know that I love you so much, and I fucking hate myself when I still feel like that.”_  
   
_“You can’t be so hard on yourself-“_  
   
_“Why do you think I never come home anymore?” Natasha asks. Her voice cracks and fizzles out towards the end, the way it usually does when she’s holding back a sob. “I feel embarrassed. Ashamed for being this fucked up. And I don’t like who I am when I’m that person, so I shoot up to feel like I’m the furthest thing from that.”_  
   
_His palms are over his eyes, kneading out the headache in his temples. “There has to be a better way. This isn’t good. It’s not good for you.”_  
   
_She shakes her head. “I finally feel happy and loved and affectionate, and... good. I feel good, Clint, and you’re telling me that you don’t want that? That I’m finally in a good place and that’s not enough? That it’s wrong?_  
   
_“It’s the drugs that make you feel good, Tash. It’s not real,” he says. “You know this. You know it isn’t.”_  
   
_“Does it matter if it’s real?” Natasha sounds shattered. Desperate, even._  
   
_Clint turns to her. He’s just absolutely exhausted with this conversation. It’s really not that hard to understand. “And what happens when it doesn’t make you feel good anymore, huh? When it pulls the rug from right under you and you need more? What happens when you do too much and you end up dead? What then?”_  
   
_“Then it happens. I don’t care,” she says. “You promised me that you would be okay with it. That if this was the best it was ever going to get, that you’d be okay with whatever came next.”_  
   
_“Do you even hear yourself?”_  
   
_“Do you?” She grimaces._  
   
_“You’re not well, Tasha,” he urges. She shakes her head in utter denial, a small ‘no’ coming through as a murmur beneath her own breath. “You’re sick.”_  
   
_The redhead scoffs, hurt. Her eyes are red. “I’m always fucking sick to you. That’s never changed.”_  
   
_He sighs defeatedly. “You need help.”_  
   
_“You think I need help?” She stares back at him with a grim, stern, unforgiving look. “What, are you gonna cuff me to another hospital bed? Have me involuntarily sectioned again, and then lie to my face? Is that what you want to do?”_  
   
_Every time she brings it up, the wind gets knocked right out of him. He gets a pang in his chest that physically hurts, and when it gets really bad, he still gets nauseous._  
   
_When he blinks, he still sees her there. In a noose, or lying half-dead in a hospital bed with bruises on her neck. If he listens long enough and hard enough, he can still hear her each and every word dripping with poison._  
   
_Maybe he’s the one that needs a bit of help. At this rate, he feels like he’s losing his bearings._  
   
_“God, Natasha,” he looks back down at his feet and holds his head in his hand._  
   
_“Is that how you’re going to ‘help’ me?” She spits._  
   
_“No,” Clint returns firmly, his tone riddled with exasperation. “No, that’s not- You know I would never do that.”_  
   
_“Honestly, I don’t know what to expect from you anymore.”_  
   
_“You can’t possibly, really believe that. You fucking know me.”_  
   
_“And I know that you’re just embarrassed and mad about what this is, because I used to be this unproblematic girl that you fell in love with. All I was to you was this prized possession that you had, and now you feel like you don’t know me-“_  
   
_“That’s just bullshit-“_  
   
_“Like I’m not who you used to know and you don’t like who I am anymore-“_  
   
_“Yeah?” He snaps back with an angry glare. “Who are you, then? Huh? Who the fuck are you that you claim I’m not seeing?”_  
   
_“This!” Natasha exclaims, working her way back to her feet. “Here. Now. This is me. This is who I am. How does this not make sense to you?”_  
   
_The words toss around in his head but they make absolutely no sense whatsoever. He convinces himself that he knows her, all of her, and that this is all a huge misunderstanding and mistake. He breathes in through his nose, and out through his mouth, and repeats it over and over until the words stop feeling like a foreign language._  
   
_He shakes his head and turns away from her yet again, just unwilling to succumb to her madness._  
   
_He can hear her breathe, deep and labored breaths. He can hear the snot backed up in her nose and the tremble in her throat._  
   
_She says, “this is how I was made, Clint. There are just some things you cannot fix, and you need to accept that.”_  
   
_Clint doesn’t realize the prickling heat at the back of both his eyes, or that he feels flashes of heat all over his body. He doesn’t even know what parts had needed fixing with her, and neither what lay at its root._  
   
_He wipes a hand over the length of his face. “I... I can’t,” he admits._  
   
_The poor man barely manages to get the words out, and when he does, it’s with a hand over his mouth._  
   
_They share a tense moment of silence. It seems to last for an eternity, the fact that they’re two lovers in a room that now feel like absolute strangers to each other._  
   
_He shifts in his seat, sinking deeper into the cushion, feeling like he weighs a ton more than an hour ago. She shifts her weight between both feet, like half of her wants to stay and the other half wants to leave._  
   
_“Then I can’t do this anymore,” Natasha says quietly._  
   
_He frowns back. “What... what do you mean?”_  
   
_“This. Us,” she replies, defeated. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to be anymore.”_  
   
_“This was just supposed to be an intervention. For the fucking drugs, Natasha, not us.”_  
   
_“Yeah, well, if you haven’t noticed, it’s kind of the same thing.”_  
   
_Clint sighs heavily. “Let’s just forget about all of this, okay? Forget I said anything, that we even had this stupid conversation.”_  
   
_“No,” she returns._  
   
_He shoots right up the moment he hears her footsteps headed towards the door. He closes the distance between them, quicker than she’s able to get her hand on the knob. Still, there’s a gap the size of the Grand Canyon — and then some — between them now, even when they’re nearly toe-to-toe._  
   
_He can see the tears already beginning to gather in her eyes, but his hands don’t reach out to touch her. He doesn’t know why._  
   
_But the archer has a deep, sinking, imminent feeling that he’ll never see her again if he lets her leave this time around. Does it make a difference, though? Because it feels like she’s already gone. She’d been gone for a while now._  
   
_Clint pleads, “just sit down and we can talk about this, please. We can talk through this.”_  
   
_He shares a glance with her in that very moment. It feels like a second too short. It feels like blame and guilt rolled into one. It feels like conviction and regret. It feels like her, but also not much._  
   
_He doesn’t know what he’s looking at anymore. And maybe she sees the exact same thing, and so she shakes her head._  
   
_“Doesn’t seem like you can.” It feels final. His heart is in his throat when he tries to find the words to argue back, to fight this, but comes up with nothing. “I’m sorry.”_  
   
_He can’t even bear to look as she walks out, and quietly shuts the door behind her._  
 

* * *

   
She’d spent the past fifteen minutes in the driver’s seat, pulled into park and with her third cigarette smoldering quietly between her fingers.  
   
She was fully leaned and rested into the seat itself, left arm propped up on the top of an open side window. She took a drag on her cigarette and felt the fumes tickle the back of her throat, and a coolness down her lungs. It forced her to breathe.  
   
To be honest, she felt sick to her stomach. One, for not having eaten at all that entire day, since she’d woken up at four that morning — it was just past midnight now.  
   
Two, due to complete and utter anxiety over running into anyone on the compound. She didn’t know if Clint had decided to stay or leave; all she did know was that his own car, which had been right there in the lot across from hers, was now gone. She also didn’t care for any of Steve’s lectures, and wasn’t planning on presenting him with an opening.  
   
She’d brushed past him earlier that morning, and surely he must have spoken to Clint immediately after.  
   
The lights were dimmed out throughout the compound, as far as she could tell. It didn’t look like the place was alive at all, so hopefully they were either gone, or asleep.  
   
Three, over the bottle of prescription that she currently had in the pocket of her jacket. She hadn’t taken anything yet, but the rattle of each pill against her hip was yet another reminder of the fact that she really, really,  _really_  fucking wanted to.  
   
The cigarettes weren’t enough of an in-between distraction anymore, to keep her mind off of what she really wanted. And at the rate that she was burning through them these days, it couldn’t be.  
   
It was stupid of her to even have gotten the prescription in the first place, especially after all of the effort that it had taken for her to work the steps — again — the past year. And it was extremely dumb of her to have brought it back to the compound, where she was most susceptible to the scrutiny of her fellow teammates and friends, and not to mention a highly intelligent home system.  
   
She reached into her pocket and fished the bottle of pills out, and she held it in her palm. Looking at it made her feel a bunch of ways, all not particularly pleasing.  
   
_Oxycodone_ , it wrote, and right underneath it was her name.  
   
She could say that she had thrown out her back and needed it for a couple of weeks to stay active. Or if no-one asked, she wouldn’t say a thing. She never did. Honestly, if Clint wasn’t around, no one would be able to tell the difference. And she knew her own way around Clint. She could do it.  
   
If she wanted to, she really could do it.  
   
The blonde stared at the orange-tinted container, and she could feel a sour pinch at the back of her nose and warm pricks behind both her eyes. Her heart sank within her chest, knowing all too well that this was going to be a bad mistake.  
   
“What the fuck are you doing?” She whispered softly to herself, feeling her mouth go dry.  
   
She was well aware that she should’ve thrown it out into the river. Or rather, she shouldn’t have gotten it in the first place, knowing how weak she’d been as of late. On the other hand, maybe she could lie to herself, bring it back to her room, and swear that she wouldn’t touch it.  
   
Like she’d sworn on her mother’s grave that she wouldn’t touch a single drug again, all those fifteen years ago.  
   
An empty promise was all that had become of it.  
   
Container fumbling in a cold and shaking hand, she shook away her thoughts and shoved the prescription right back into her pocket. She then took a long, wholesome drag on her last cigarette, followed it with a hefty exhale, and crushed the butt against the paint job of her car before flicking it off.  
   
She pulled down the sun visor and cracked open the vanity mirror, wiped her stained face with her fingers, sorted the face-framing strands of her hair out, and polished herself off.  
   
She shut the mirror and the sun visor as soon as she finally managed to look collected enough to seem absolutely normal, like she hadn’t been faced with a moment of weakness just mere seconds ago.  
   
Natasha then took a deep and clean inhale, feeling the smoke-free pressure at the back of her throat and in her chest as she held it, and let it out with a sigh. She exited the car, paced across the lawn, and braced herself as she made her silent entry through a side door and into the kitchen.  
   
She stepped in quietly — slow kept things smooth, and smooth meant fast, and she wanted to get out of there fast— but not quietly enough. Then again, any amount of quiet would still have landed her right in this predicament anyway.  
   
Steve, who was sat down on a bar stool by the island bench with a journal in his hand, had been expecting her.  
   
“I figured you’d be back eventually,” the man said, setting the journal down and glancing up at her.  
   
The weathered leather cover of the journal seemed familiar to her; the familiarity of it tickled her mind, but not quite enough for her to remember exactly where she had recognized it from.  
   
With only half her body through the doorway, Natasha stepped the rest of the way in and shut the door with a loud, audible click. After all, her absolute worst-case scenario for that night was already happening. Staying quiet didn’t help.  
   
She stayed in the corner nearest to the hallway. “If I’d known you were still going to be up and waiting, I wouldn’t have,” she quipped back.  
   
He flashed a slight, knowing grin. “Would’ve stayed in the city?”  
   
“Yeah, for the night. Get some sleep in before coming back to... whatever  _this_  is going to be.”  
   
“What  _this_  is, is a warm, home-cooked meal,” Steve replied. “I saw your breakfast in the trash, figured you hadn’t eaten. And that you wouldn’t, like always.”  
   
“Like always?” The blonde raised a brow.  
   
He shrugged. “So I’ve been noticing things, not a big deal.” Then, he stepped off the bar stool and went over to stir the pot of soup on the stovetop. “Do you want a big portion or a small portion?”  
   
“I’m not hungry.”  
   
“Big portion it is,” he concluded. He slopped three ladles’ worth of warm soup into a bowl, and set it on the bench. “Don’t let it get cold, come on.”  
   
She stared at him intently and quietly as he sat down, her body keeping still. Her posture remained defensive, with her arms tucked into the pockets of her jacket as she leaned her shoulder against a dry wall.  
   
The container in her hand provided some tangible, physical comfort. The fact it did, made her sick.  
   
They shared a tense beat before the captain offered up one of his more assertive stares. “Natasha,” he started.  
   
“Steve.”  
   
“Can you just sit down, please?”  
   
She gave it an honest second of thought. “Is this going to be another one of your interventions?” Natasha pried. “Because remember the last time you tried to have one of those-“  
   
“I dragged you to one of the Group sessions and you went ballistic on all of those poor people? Yeah, I remember that,” he said.  
   
They both shared a hint of a knowing grin from that incident; it clearly hadn’t been one of her finest moments, but it had made a very lasting impression.  
   
She just hated crisis interventions, meetings and useless support groups. Basically, anything that had to do with getting all touchy-feely with tough feelings — at least, those that weren’t discussed in her therapist’s office — was the bane of her existence. The poor man, one of many, had been at the receiving end of her rage-fueled outburst.  
   
An untimely thing, Natasha had to admit that that outburst had been a product of unresolved emotions and the fact that she constantly felt like a dry drunk. And yes, the narc version of a dry drunk was a very real stage of her journey back to sobriety.  
   
That had been the worst part, and still continued to be the worst part months after.  
   
At the thought, that grin left her face as quickly as it came. She let go of the pills in-hand and fished both her hands out, crossing them over her chest instead.  
   
Steve sighed to himself. “And no, it’s not one of those, I promise,” he continued. “Just a bit of dinner and looking out for a friend.”  
   
Relenting, she shared a deep sigh of her own — along with an inward roll of her eyes — and paced over to the bench. To be fair, the bowl of soup smelled pretty appetizing. She just really wasn’t in the mood for any of that, and that in itself made her stomach go queasy at the idea of any food.  
   
The blonde didn’t sit, but leaned her palms into the surface of the island bench. “I appreciate it, Steve, but I’m just... I don’t know. I just wanna take a shower and go to bed, okay?”  
   
“Bad day?” He pressed. She swallowed, and didn’t reply. There weren’t really any right words that she could put into it. “Not talking either, huh. So definitely a bad day.”  
   
“The last time I had a conversation with someone else today, I nearly bit his head off. He’s probably halfway back to Japan by now, or somewhere else that I wouldn’t be able to seek out.”  
   
The man’s brows furrowed a little. “I don’t think you’d scare him off that easily. You both’ve probably had fights worse than this.”  
   
“Yeah, for sure,” she scoffed lightly. Sure enough, the pair had had arguments much uglier than the one that they’d had that morning, clearly an effort on both their parts. “Just... I said and did a bunch of things I shouldn’t have. I’m sure he’s pissed.”  
   
“With you?”  
   
Natasha let out another sigh, dropping her weight heavily onto the surface area of the stool across from the captain. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Me, himself, the world. I don’t know, Steve.”  
   
He pushed the bowl across to her side of the bench, and held out a spoon to her. “Well, my mother taught me that it’s never a good idea to overthink things on an empty stomach, so.”  
   
She chuckled slightly at the idea of young, scrawny Steve Roger — disheveled hair and suspenders and all — being lamented by his own mother about running on empty. Funnily enough, that must have been where the idea had come from, Steve’s mother.  
   
When she never had any appetite, James had always relayed the same thing; he couldn’t recall where or whom he’d learnt it from, except that it was something innate within him.  
   
“I hope it tastes as good as it smells,” Steve continued, as soon as she gave in and took the spoon from his grasp. “I’m not a great cook.”  
   
She stared down into the bowl, noting the pale, avocado-green tint of the soup. It had a rather thick and creamy consistency, and smelled of potatoes and leek, and peas. The scent was pleasing enough to lead her to believe that it would taste just as good.  
   
“Well, at least it’s not bloodied mashed potatoes,” noted Natasha.  
   
The captain, on the other hand, pulled into a half-scowl. Surely he recalled the absolute travesty of his own scalp laceration bleeding into his mash at breakfast, after a long and exhausting night spent on an intendedly stealthy recon mission in Oman that had gone wrong. “I don’t understand how that’s still a thing.”  
   
“It’s never not gonna be a thing, Steve. You’d best get used to it.”  
   
“And here I thought we were friends. This doesn’t seem particularly friendly, does it?” He mocked.  
   
“It’s endearing,” she corrected with a shrug, and he squinted, thoroughly unconvinced. “And it’s what Sam would’ve wanted,” she continued.  
   
With that, the man relented with a crestfallen face. They never really did talk about any of their fallen, at least not in the amount of detail that they had deserved out of the living. Any words spoken about them were always in passing, or kept to oneself, and neither Steve nor herself had been ready to have that conversation on either end.     
   
She then stared back at the soup, and found it looking more fluorescent green at second glance. It still smelled stellar, but she would be lying if she didn’t admit that the color of the stew was giving her second thoughts. “If I die, you’re paying for my funeral,” she segued.  
   
“If you die, you can take my mother’s recipe with you to the grave.”  
   
“‘Cos you would’ve butchered it?” Natasha smirked, raising an inquisitive brow. She took a spoonful into her mouth, and wasn’t surprised. “Steve Rogers, and a grim joke. First I’ve seen together.”  
   
He grinned back. “Been spending way too much time around you these days, that’s why.”  
   
She didn’t disagree, and rolled her eyes instead, supplementing it with a light chuckle. It was a momentary second of relief, a good laugh, forgetting about everything that was running marathons in her own mind. It was short-lived, way too short, and soon enough she was back in her brooding, and it petered out.  
   
The blonde exhaled deeply, staring back down at the bowl of soup in front of her. She tossed each spoonful, pondering over taking in a second mouthful.  
   
“What’s up?” He finally prodded again.  
   
“It’s nothing.”  
   
“For someone who used to lie for a living, that has probably got to be the worst lie you’ve ever told.”  
   
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” She took another mouthful of soup. It was warm enough to slightly scald her tongue and roof of her mouth.  
   
Steve sighed, this time dreadfully. “Sure,” he conceded. “I just need to know where your head’s at, that’s all.”  
   
“That another one of your recent observations?” She glanced up at him.  
   
“Nat, you went dark for a year. You disappeared, and nobody knew where you went,” he said firmly.  
   
“I took a well-deserved holiday.”  
   
“And then, out of nowhere, you show up at the front gate,” the captain continued. “Ever since then, it’s like you’ve been all over the place, going at over a hundred miles an hour for far too long. I think that’s saying something.”  
   
“Let’s just say I’m overcompensating for a year-long vacation in the Bahamas.”  
   
“I’ve spent this past year letting it happen, and I never called you out on it. I’m starting to realize that maybe I should’ve.”  
   
“Maybe,” she shrugged. “I don’t think you need to worry about me, Steve.”  
   
“I don’t think you get to decide that,” he argued back calmly.  
   
She groaned inwardly, and put another spoonful of soup in her mouth, a measure of silent defiance. She could feel his eyes on her, just... watching her, exactly the way Clint always had, like a goddamn hawk. A frustration grew at the pit of her stomach, and at the same time, an odd sense of comfort.  
   
He leaned into the table, resting his hands on the surface. “Look, I just need to know if you’re okay, or if you’re not, or if it’s more complicated than that. And I really hope you’ll be honest with me.”  
   
Natasha’s gaze went right back on the man that sat before her, and she pondered deeply on her next response. To be honest, to not be honest, to be incredibly vague, to simply walk off.  
   
God, there was so much she wanted to do right now, and yet the amount of genuine concern in Steve’s eyes — trained right on her — and his posture, and his demeanor, and everything else, it made her feel a type of way. The way she’d been expecting to feel the day she brought Clint home. It pained her, a lot. She should’ve been having this conversation with Clint, and only because he was the only one who knew her from end to end.  
   
She pulled her gaze away, taking a deep breath. She braced herself. “It’s more complicated than that,” the blonde admitted vaguely.  
   
“And are you getting that straightened out?”  
   
“Nearly there,” she said, convincingly enough to his ears but not to her own. “Working on it.”  
   
“Okay, that’s... that’s good,” Steve nodded. “Well you know, if you ever need someone to talk things through...”  
   
She spared him the slightest smile. “I know, Steve. Thank you, really.”  
   
“Sure,” he returned with a sure smile of his own.  
   
Natasha dug in to more of the soup in the bowl — Jesus Christ, the man really hadn’t been joking when he decided to torture her with the larger portion — and the captain sat across from her, picking up the journal again.  
   
It was as if he was standing watch, surveilling her and making sure that she cleared out whatever food that had been meant to go into her body. Even the thought of dumping the rest of it in the bin had just slipped right past her, because there was no fucking chance that he’d let her do that, let alone think that.  
   
She took a spoonful and rested it in her mouth, the neck of the spoon lodged between her own two lips, and she glanced up at him.  
   
Steve was rather invested in that journal, amongst others that she’d seen him reading before. He had always been fully focused on the content that was messily scribbled down on pieces of stained paper. She never really did find out, in this past year of him walking around with notebooks like that, about what was so important in those books.  
   
At least, not until it finally clicked for her right then and there. It fell right into place from the moment she had recognized the leather cover of the very notebook in his hand.  
   
It had been one of James’.  
   
She had seen it on one of his shelves, back when she’d visited — she had been invited down to help with a series of psychological evaluations for the man. In between sessions and visits, they had spent time, and every now and then she would spot him brooding alone from afar.  
   
He would sit by the riverbank, balancing a leatherback on his knee and putting pen to paper. And when she would come over, the weary soldier would tuck it back under his thigh, as if it was never there in the first place.  
   
She absently eyed Steve as his eyes scanned the words on the page of that journal he was so invested in, with way too much on her own mind.  
   
“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here, Nat,” he piped up unsuspectingly, his eyes not leaving the page. Natasha remained quiet. “And I’m glad that Clint’s back too, and I’m sure that whatever’s up between the both of you will sort itself out in time.”  
   
She shifted her gaze, this time eyeing the captain with more intention than before. She set her spoon down. “I sense a but.”  
   
Steve set the journal down and returned her intuitive look with a thoughtful one of his own. “ _But_ , sometimes we tend to get too caught up in our own heads that we start to neglect the people around us. Like how this sit-down has been long overdue,” he continued.  
   
“So what are you saying?”  
   
“I’m saying, it takes effort getting out of our own heads, but at the end of the day, we still have to take care of our own.”  
   
She hummed in response, enunciating both her acknowledgement and her agreement. “We take care of our own,” she repeated back, feeling the words make sense of themselves on her own two lips.  
   
The assassin thought carefully about the words, and ran them through her mind over and over. The words were familiar, something that had been ingrained into her core over time.  
   
Years back, Clint had constantly reminded her of the same, that it was innate within him to take care of his own, and that she was a part of what he would consider to be ‘his own’. At the time, he had been so sure of himself, 100% of the time. She, on the other hand, had been turbulent, and it had been exactly what she’d needed.  
   
She realized then and there that both of their efforts had seemed to peter off since then, as soon as things had gotten complicated. With the drugs, and the distrust, and the lies, and the hurt that came with all of it, it had been hard on him.  
   
If she could pinpoint the very moment that it had all gone to shit, it would’ve been the night that he had thrown her out of his house. It’d been for good reason, of course. It had been about her — her life (or rather, her blatant disregard of), her death, and her sobriety.  
   
Clint had given her a million chances and more, and her then-destructive self had burned through all of them. They’d called it quits then, not that it had lasted long enough to be of any significance.  
   
“You know, he used to say that all the time, when it was just us. Back when I needed it the most,” she mused. Thinking back to those times was bittersweet, sweet because of how far they’d come, and bitter because of how much they had let go of, after all this time. “Somewhere along the way, perhaps we’d started taking that for granted.”  
   
“It happens.“  
   
Natasha sighed heftily. “I should’ve known better,” she remarked about herself, reflecting hard. “I’ve just been in my head so much to sort myself out. He deserved better than today.”  
   
A slight, knowing smile rested in in-between states on the captain’s lips. “Like I said, it happens.”  
   
She offered one of her own in return, slighter than ever. Then, she looked to her own fingers, deep in thought and even deeper in remorse. “I really hope I didn’t drive him away,” she said.  
   
“I’m sure you didn’t.”  
   
“God, and I asked him to come back, only for me to fuck it up,” Natasha cringed. “Sorry for the language.”  
   
Steve dismissed it with a slight chuckle and a simple shake of his head. “You’re something special, Nat, and I bet he listens to you a lot, but probably not that much,” he said. “Point is, maybe nasty words were exchanged. But if Clint did decide to go off the grid again, my guess is it would’ve been his own choice to do so. Not because you told him to.”  
   
“You don’t understand, I-“  
   
She reviewed all of the words exchanged that very morning, this time in explicit detail. Every shy-away, and every remark lashed out and received. Every single touch and look and breath taken in those few minutes that they’d spent together.  
   
And it dawned on her. They had talked about home. They had talked about his homestead in Iowa, and she could bet her life and limb on the fact that that was likely where he’d gone off to.  
   
First, she felt relieved. She felt a sense of relief envelop her bones as she realized that he probably hadn’t disappeared off to another corner of the world that he knew she wouldn’t find.  
   
Then, the bitter reality of that very same notion came to fruition. That he’d gone back, to the very place he had revealed just this morning that he wasn’t yet ready to return to. While the assassin knew that that was something that had to happen eventually, she always figured that she would’ve been right there by his side when he finally did.  
   
Yet, here she was.  
   
Never before had she felt like a worse partner than at that very moment, and she knew that she had to go. With every fibre of her being, Natasha knew that she had to go, and that she had to be there, regardless of the tough words exchanged.  
   
So, she stood up abruptly. Getting to her feet, she frowned. “I... I need to go.”  
   
Steve blinked. “You’ve barely eaten.”  
   
She grimaced apologetically. “I’m sorry, I can’t be here. I really have to go.”  
   
“Somewhere you have to be?” He asked while she was in the processing of collecting herself, and whatever things she had or needed to have.  
   
“Kinda, yeah,” she said hastily. The man obliged in return, a slightly disappointed yet gracious smile gracing his lips. “I’m really sorry, Steve, but good talk. I really needed this.”  
   
“Of course.”  
   
With haste and a definite need for some caffeine, Natasha herself was already halfway out the door when she promised to grab some food along the way.  
   
Still completely confused about the nature of her sudden departure, Steve called out, “to where?”  
   
“Iowa!” She said, so sure of herself for the first time in a long time. And as bad as it was, and as grim as things were, it felt good. It felt really good.  
   
She tossed her small, orange-tinted container of prescription pills in the trash as she left.  
 

* * *

   
**_New York, September 2006_**  
   
_Sometimes she looks down at her hands and she feels like she doesn’t have good grip. Not on her thoughts, her things, her life, herself. She thinks of it as trying to hold onto the important things that need to be held onto — her rationality, her sanity, her relationships, her control — but these days they tend to slip through her fingers like sand._  
   
_Today is one of those days, just like the day before, and the week before that, and the month prior. Today is one of those days, in a long string of similar days, where she finds herself desperately holding on to nothing in particular._  
   
_It scares her, all right down to her muscles and her bones. It’s been forty-five minutes since she has managed to take a proper breath, a full day since her hands haven’t stopped shaking, and a whole week of dangerously wandering thoughts._  
   
_The bathroom light is yellow, and further dimmed out by the steam of scalding water from the shower, and she has to squint her eyes. When the front door slams shut, she hears gunshots instead and she jumps. Her skin crawls. Her hands get clammy even just after a fresh shower. The slam starts to rewind and replay itself like a loop pedal._  
   
_Sitting on the edge of the closed toilet seat, Natasha covers her ears with her hands, shuts her eyes, and tries to listen to herself breathe._  
   
_She doesn’t feel too well._  
   
_From outside, she hears even more uncharacteristic banging and shoving and sliding. A noisy rearrangement of things, the opening and closing and reopening of drawers and wardrobes and everything in between that consisted of a nook and a cranny._  
   
_She unsteadily gets to her feet and leaves the bathroom, but not before catching a blurry glimpse of her own flushed and blotchy, dark-circled and white-lipped reflection in the mirror. She waits by the doorway to their room. He’s going through her stuff._  
   
_Natasha blinks. “What are you doing?” It seems like a stupid question; she knows exactly what he’s doing. Still, she asks it anyway._  
   
_In between tossing through drawers of her tops and digging through the pockets of her neatly folded bottoms, Clint doesn’t look up at her. He spot-checks her drawers all the way through to the back, and both sides, all for corners, and in between every fabric of clothing._  
   
_Coming up empty, he scurries through tiny compartments of her trinkets and accessories — all of which she’s accidentally left behind over the few years that she has stayed the night, or the month, or the year._  
   
_His fingers catch onto her engagement ring, looped through a silver chain. He hasn’t asked why she doesn’t wear it anymore, and — by now — has neglected to probe if she’d thought his proposal over and had made her decision._  
   
_Then again, he had popped the question nearly ten months ago, and she had been away and thought dead for four of those. It’s the least of his concerns, and not necessarily her first priority now._  
   
_He works through the ring and chain like he doesn’t see them, or that he does but doesn’t care._  
   
_“You know what I’m doing.” His voice is strung terse and with anger. She has no energy, no reserves, to deal with his anger._  
   
_The redhead sighs. “Fine.”_  
   
_He looks up at her. It’s probably the third time since 2002 that she has seen that extent of anger in his eyes. They’re usually calm and collected and reassuring to look into. Looking into them now, she doesn’t know what she should expect._  
   
_Clint is pale-skinned enough to go visibly flushed when he’s really mad. She sees the warm hue presenting itself under his skin as he gets up and straightens out, and his hands stop digging. Then, she sees his eyes stray downwards to glance over her covered arms and bare hands._  
   
_Bare trembling hands, she remembers. She folds them to herself and leans shoulder-first against the door frame._  
   
_He looks back up at her once more, hard eyes no different than before. “You were at Jacobs’ place on Saturday, right?”_  
   
_She recalls heading over to Dan Jacobs’ place over the weekend. She’d been doing the fellow agent a favor while he’d been drafted out to Istanbul with the archer. “Yeah. Dan told me to help feed his cat.”_  
   
_“I was talking to Jacobs today in the infirmary. He said he was there to get a new prescription for painkillers. Said he’d somehow lost them, swore it was there a couple of weeks ago,” Clint says pointedly. His severe tone doesn’t ease up, and she knows exactly where this is going. “He thinks he’s just misplaced them.”_  
   
_“If you’re implying that I swiped his meds, I didn’t. You know I wouldn’t do that.”_  
   
_To be fair, she did think about it. She’d fed his cat, compulsively cleaned up the kitchen, freshened herself up in his bathroom, and then she had scouted out his medicine cabinet, like she would always do with any and every medicine cabinet in sight._  
   
_She can’t lie and say that it isn’t a habit; it is. There’s just something oddly telling about the way that a person stocks up their medicine cabinet — if it’s empty, if it’s overpacked, if it’s full of beauty products or rolls of toilet paper, if it’s an acting storage space for spare trinkets and parts, or if it’s plain full of medicine like hers used to be. Running her fingers through shelves upon shelves of palm-sized items, it feels rather comforting._  
   
_So, yes. She did come across some pills, and she sure as hell did have the urge to take them and leave, but the prescription had been for codeine. She doesn’t mix well with codeine, or tramadol, in that they’re just too lightweight for her taste._  
   
_It wouldn’t have been worth it._  
   
_Natasha and her partner hold a steady gaze, hers lethargic and uninterested, and his red-hot and angry, and nearly accusatory. “Well, I don’t know what to believe anymore,” he remarks._  
   
_“Why? Nothing’s changed.”_  
   
_“Exactly, Tasha. Nothing’s changed,” Clint replies. There’s an edge to his tone that she hasn’t heard in a while, that she doesn’t like. It sounds akin to sharpening knives. “You don’t eat. You don’t talk. You’re here, and you’re not here, and you’re all over the place, and nothing has changed.”_  
   
_She swallows. Her throat is dry and feels like sandpaper. “I’m sorry. I’ve just been readjusting.”_  
   
_“No, I’ve seen you get adjusted, and this isn’t it. This is different. This is familiar. I know what this is. We both do.”_  
   
_“If you’re not gonna believe anything I tell you, then I don’t know what you want me to say,” she comments sorely. It falls rather flat._  
   
_The archer’s eyes are still on her, and staring intently. She swallows again, her thoughts surfacing once more today as whispers in the background. “Tell me where they are.”_  
   
_“Where what is?”_  
   
_“The drugs,” he says. He turns away from her this time around and gets back into the tandem of tossing through her stuff. “I’m sure they’re somewhere in this goddamn house.”_  
   
_Natasha sighs. “There’s nothing here. There’s nothing here because I’m not using.”_  
   
_He stands back up. “You’re lying,” he says. He doesn’t look at her. Instead, he eyes the mess made of their room and he ponders for a beat, thinking aloud. “No, you wouldn’t put them here. You’d know better than that. You’d put them somewhere...”_  
   
_Not nearly finishing his own sentence, he pushes past her and moves into the hallway, feet moving fast towards their spare bathroom down the hall. Her stomach feels like a stone cold slab of marble, but her skin feels hot and bothered. Her own heart is in her throat as she trails along behind him, and watches as he tears through the medicine cabinet._  
   
_She stands in wait on the outside of the space, feeling the light touch of fingers creeping around her neck, and he steps in without thinking. All she can think about it the fact that he hasn’t stepped in there in over two years, nearly three._  
   
_“Are you being serious right now?” She frowns._  
   
_Coming up empty, Clint gets up and moves towards their living room. He doesn’t look back at her when he says, “very.”_  
   
_The man works through every possible space in the room, opening and closing doors to drawers and cupboards speedily and tougher than he had probably intended. He sieves through the pillows and seat cushions to their living room couch, feeling them up and zipping them all open to cop a better feel._  
   
_A foreign anger moves up her neck, and once again, she feels like she can’t breathe. Her face must be a shade of cherry red by now, but she can’t really tell._  
   
_He starts going through her bags, tossing through pouches and satchels and purses, and the little zipper compartments in each and every one of them. It’s degrading, and she feels like another one of his marks — a criminal._  
   
_“Stop it,” Natasha urges assertively. He doesn’t let up, doesn’t react, doesn’t say a word. It’s as if she isn’t there. “You’re acting insane.”_  
   
_Still, Clint’s hands don’t stop moving. In times like these, he has a one-track mind. She wishes that he’d decide to use it for better things than to try and call a bluff — her bluff — that might not even exist. It maddens her, and her thoughts seem to grow louder in a massive crescendo._  
   
_She wrings her wrists with her hands, a physical manifestation of her ensemble of thoughts. The inside of her left wrist stings with sores._  
   
_“Clint, please.”_  
   
_He stops in his tracks, but he doesn’t turn to face her. He stands right by the rack of coats and jackets, hands fully still. “For once, just one time, Tasha, please don’t lie to me. Not about this,” he says quietly._  
   
_“I promise, I’m not using,” she replies. It’s almost a plead, but one that’s running empty. It comes off with blunted affect. “I haven’t used. I wouldn’t lie to you.”_  
   
_The archer doesn’t move, at least not from what she can see. He only breathes, one, two, three shallow breaths that barely rock his chest._  
   
_Her breaths come similarly shallow. But while he stands completely still now, her body is a mess of tremors. They run up each nerve and down every groove to her bones, from deep within her core to the tips of her furthermost extremities. She tightens the grip around her wrist._  
   
_Then, the man sighs. “I told you not to lie to me,” he laments, and he dips a hand into one of her coat pockets. There’s something in his grip. “Just one time, I needed you not to lie to me, and you just couldn’t do that, could you?”_  
   
_“I can explain.”_  
   
_He turns to face her now, his gait tense and his face completely removed of any hint of emotion. While he’s usually predictable, it’s in moments like these when he becomes plain impossible to read._  
   
_Natasha doesn’t need to look at what he presents in his palm to know what it is. “I can explain, okay?” She repeats._  
   
_The man scoffs. His jaw sets and unsets, then resets once more. “I want you back in rehab today,” he demands. His eyes are trained only on the full stash that he now has in his hands._  
   
_She shakes her head, defensive. “I know how this looks, but I haven’t used. I promise you, Clint, I haven’t used.”_  
   
_“I don’t believe you.”_  
   
_“Please, can we just- can we sit down and talk about this? Please?” Her pleads tumble out of her like they’re on autopilot. The voices in her head bounce these words off like reading off of a script, to a mouth that has no filter. Again, her pleads amass no substance and sound completely flat. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll tell you everything.”_  
   
_“No,” he rejects. “You lie, Natasha. You’re a liar. You just lied to my face two seconds ago, and you’ll lie again because that’s who you are when you’re using, and I’m not gonna fall for it again-“_  
   
_“I’m not using,” she denies._  
   
_“-in what reality do you think I’d believe you when you’re like this, huh?”_  
   
_Her wrist hurts. “I’m not using.”_  
   
_“Jesus, I let you into my home!” Clint explodes._  
   
_His voice booms across the living room and ricochets off the walls. Again, like bombs and like bullets. She can’t get it out of her head. She flinches away. “I trusted you, and I trusted your word. And then you bring drugs into my house. You used in my fucking house?”_  
   
_His voice escalates, and so does the white noise in her head._  
   
_Natasha can’t catch a breath, and she can feel an ugly panic encroaching upon her psyche. “I’m not using,” she barely manages. She doesn’t even recognize her own voice now, to the point that it sounds like the voice of a complete stranger._  
   
_The archer glares at her, gripping the stash hard. One could see the extent of his anger through his protruding knuckles, if not already through the swelling veins in his neck and over his temples. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe that.”_  
   
_“If you love me, you’d try to listen-”_  
  
_“No. We’re not playing this game anymore,” he says firmly. “We’re not doing this again. This whole ‘if you love me’ thing, it’s bullshit. You know it’s bullshit.”_  
  
_“It’s there just in case I need it, okay?” She tries to explain. It’s a really vague, really bad explanation._  
   
_By the time she strings enough words together in her head to correct her statement, he’s already shut her out._  
   
_“And that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Clint poses back curtly. His fury is unrelenting. “That you need it at all, that’s what’s wrong here.”_  
   
_“You don’t understand, I-“_  
   
_“No, I don’t understand! How can I possibly understand this?” He cries out, and pulls an exasperated hand over his face. His voice cracks._  
   
_Again, she flinches away from his escalating tone._  
   
_Her chest is working in some serious overtime, and she feels like she’s about to throw up. Her ears are ringing again, overstimulated and sensitive to his voice. She looks down to her feet, hiding her eyes. She tries to ground herself with counts. Her left wrist hurts._  
   
_“How is this still okay for you, Tasha?” Her partner questions further. “You were sober before you went to Lebanon. You were good, you said you were happy that you were getting better. And now- were you shooting up while you were there, is that it?”_  
   
_Her eyes don’t leave the floor. “No.”_  
   
_“Did they drug you, then? The people that held you those four months, did they drug you?”_  
   
_She shakes her head. Another no, but the words can’t seem to reach her lips._  
   
_She can’t get air. Her lungs are burning and she feels her skin starting to run a high temperature. Her body trembles even more and her chest feels split apart. She can feel her legs beginning to go flaccid beneath her, like she’s two seconds from collapsing from a fainting spell or a heart attack._  
   
_Her panic grips her throat in a silent chokehold._  
   
_“Then I don’t understand this,” Clint spits. He digs through the stash right in front of her, dishing out heartless judgement. “I don’t understand the- the oxy, or the heroin. I don’t understand the meth. I don’t understand any of it, or why you’re back to square one again.”_  
   
_“I just-“ She’s flustered. Even her words on autopilot have run out, and all that’s left is the gaping hole of her escalating anxiety. “I didn’t feel- I just needed something to take the edge off whenever things got bad.”_  
   
_He frowns. “When is what’s getting bad?”_  
   
_“It’s nothing.” It’s definitely something._  
   
_“When what’s getting bad, Tasha?” He urges, with considerable concern._  
   
_He tries to reach out but she flinches away immediately. She feels sick to her stomach and like she’s about to keel over. He pales a fraction._  
   
_“It’s not... it’s nothing,” she denies once more._  
   
_The archer scoffs under his own heavy breath. “Right, nothing,” he bites back brusquely. “It’s always nothing with you.”_  
   
_“I’m handling it.”_  
   
_“With what? With this?” He holds up the stash. His question comes off incredulous. “You haven’t even gone for any of your evals. Handling it, my ass,” he comments. “You don’t talk. You always lie, about everything. If you’re not dying, you’re high. And you’re not even remotely interested in getting better and I can’t understand why.”_  
   
_Natasha feels a dull sting to the inside of her left wrist. “I’m not high.”_  
   
_He doesn’t hear her. It looks like he hasn’t intended to, not since the start of their argument. Instead, he pushes his fingers through his hair in an almost tough manner._  
   
_There’s a look of disgust to his features, to his eyes. “God, Tasha, I’ve been inside you,” his tone sours. “I’ve been inside you and yet I still know nothing about you. Nothing real.”_  
   
_She spots fresh blood under the fingernails to her right hand. Though not abundant, there are still stains. She flips over her left wrist, only to find the bleeding, reopened wounds of sores that were meant to have scabbed over._  
   
_She frowns at the sight of her wrist. She then looks down at her shirt, where she had crossed her arms. There’s the slightest hint of bloodstains patterned in small streaks. She blinks, and more red comes into view. Another blink, and she’s dripping in crimson. Her hands aren’t clean._  
   
_Voices bark at her in earshot but she can’t make out the words. There are wails, screams, grueling shrieks._  
   
_“What the hell happened to you for you to have become such a broken person, huh? How are you so fucked up?” Clint questions._  
   
_The assassin glances up at him, stricken by his comment, only to find that their eyes meet. She catches a glimpse into the depths of his stern stare, and the look in his chromatic grey eyes are bordering on desperation._  
   
_Contrary to what she would’ve figured he would look like per his short tone, she finds that Clint looks absolutely shattered. She hadn’t noticed the tears that were beginning to gather along the waterline of both his eyes._  
   
_She wonders what he sees in hers, because his face crumples the slightest bit._  
   
_At the sudden and sharp sounds of gunshots and blasts that make her blood curdle, she jumps. She blinks and looks away, distracted by the noise._  
   
_The two agents share a tense beat feeling worlds apart, and while the air begins to change, Natasha is far too distracted to notice. The air stills completely, as if waiting for a reckoning, and the grave silence starts to become evident._  
   
_While she works through her breaths and tries to shut the noise and the voices out, he works through his thoughts until there’s an unsettling calmness to his manner._  
   
_And then he says, “get out.”_  
   
_“What?”_  
   
_Clint doesn’t blink. His jaw is set, as is his mind. “Get out of my house,” he reiterates._  
   
_Her breathing is shaky. Her wrist really fucking hurts. Her whole body is a mess waiting to fall apart from the inside, out. “Clint, come on. You’re overreacting.”_  
   
_On the contrary, his voice is quiet. His breaths are steady. Shallow, full of effort, but steady as ever. So are his hands. “No, I’m done.”_  
   
_“I don’t understand.”_  
   
_She feels herself unraveling, spiraling right out of whatever little control she has left, if any at all._  
   
_“I’m just- I’m done, Tasha,” he says firmly. “I’m done trying to help you. I’m done trying to save you. I just can’t do this anymore, just can’t keep standing around and watching you do everything in your power to kill yourself. Because that’s what you’ve been wanting all this while, right? To destroy yourself? So I’m done. Go ahead, shoot up, kill yourself, whatever. I’m done.”_  
   
_The back of her eyes burn with intensity. Her gaze travels from the corner of the nearby wall, to her feet, then to his feet, up to his knees, past his abdomen, beyond his collarbones. In due time, it reaches his face once more._  
   
_She can’t make out the look on his face. It’s stoic, yet also fueled with emotion. His jaw is slack and his chiseled cheeks are loose, but his stare is cold and hard, and despairing._  
   
_“So, here. You want your drugs? You need them so bad?” Clint tosses it onto the nearby kitchen counter. The plastic stash slides off and onto the floor right beside it. “Take them. Take them and get the hell out of my house.”_  
   
_Natasha watches him. She watches the gears in his head turn and churn, seemingly to wait for him to think long enough to realize that he’s made a mistake. This isn’t Clint’s first ultimatum between them, and he has always regretted his harshness._  
   
_Because that’s just who the man is. A faithful caretaker, a patient man, a mitigator of mistakes before they turn into avalanches and landslides, and just all-around inherently good until proven otherwise._  
   
_Yet, it’s when it matters the most that he finally proves her wrong, because he’s made up his mind now, one that he’s not planning to regret. Not in 30 seconds, nor 30 minutes, nor 30 days._  
   
_She can see it in his manner. She can feel it in his presence. He looks at her like a complete stranger now, and he wants her gone._  
   
_It’s the straw on her back that breaks her. Staring at him, she feels winded. She wants to speak, but her lips are sewn shut. She wants to listen, but her ears ring with static and white noise. She can’t move, not an inch. There’s nothing she can fathom to do in this sorry state but to watch him._  
   
_If there are tears in her eyes, she can’t feel them. Everything else is sudden stillness, like the world has just hit pause._  
   
_Clint grimaces, and he looks away. Maybe he’s ashamed, or maybe he’s hurting. He just can’t stand to keep on watching, and so he turns his face away from her, and he says, “I want you gone by the time I get back.”_  
   
_He’s out of his front door before the words even begin to make any sense. And she looks at her hands as they desperately hold onto nothing; this, on the other hand, makes complete sense._  
   
_The drugs are still on the floor and her belongings are still there, mostly untouched, by the time he comes home_   _a couple of hours later. She, on the other hand, is nowhere to be seen, as requested._  
   
_She still doesn’t feel too well, in fact not well at all, but that’s just how it is._  
   
_Natasha is a month gone before he begins to realize his biggest mistake. And, as always, then comes the landslide._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof, long one. Next one will be Clint-centric!


End file.
